Image: Hornazos de Vélez Rubio (Almería, España)

Description: Do you know what a hornazo is? The hornazo is a cake, usually sweet, made from bread dough and decorated with different ingredients depending on the area, such as eggs, almonds, sugar, some spices... Its preparation and consumption are widespread in multiple local variants in the period of Holy Week. From the Christianization process of these pagan rituals seems to derive the custom of decorating the cakes with crosses, made with strips of dough, which are generally placed on one or several eggs to fix them in the hornazo. We can also find it in the form of figures or animals, although this trend is more recent. The presence of eggs on this date, at the end of penitential season, seems to derive from the prohibition of eating eggs during Lent, considered as meat until 1784. The reintroduction of eggs in the diet of the Lenten period has been accompanied by a resignification process of this food as a symbol of life and resurrection. The hornazos were normally made in private homes using their own wood-fired oven or they were taken to the bakery to bake. Although there are still families that follow this tradition, in many cases they are made in local bakeries and pastry shops. It is a representative sweet of Holy Week, although it can also be prepared during the year. In the Digital Guide to the Cultural Heritage of Andalusia you can learn more about this sweet tradition.
Title: Hornazos de Vélez Rubio (Almería, España)
Credit: I contacted the Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico personally (olga.vinuales@juntadeandalucia.es) and they authorized Wikipedia to use their photographs under the CC 3.0 license. You can check their authorship on their Facebook.
Author: Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico (IAPH) – Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
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