Jijona Christmas Fair

Maybe now it's the right moment to publish this post as it goes along with Christmas... The thing is that I visited this fair a year ago and these photos are from last year's Christmas! 🙂 It took me just a year to publish them... 😄 Anyway, Christmas is Christmas, and this year, I visited some other Christmas fairs, but I have nice memories of Jijona and their Feria de Navidad!

This small town is situated in the same province where I live, but not on the seaside, but rather in the mountains... Like many other towns in Alicante province, it has two names, one in Castellano (what others are calling the Spanish language) - Jijona, and the other in Valenciano (local language) - Xixona... So if you search it in Google Maps, you will find both names used...

What you can see in these first couple of photos are "small" (in this case not that small) model representing Bethlehem and the born of Jesus Christ... Here in Spain, it is very popular to create these models in different parts of town, cities, shops, etc., while in other countries, that is usually represented inside churches...

This one was created outside, on the street, and what you can see in the background is a real rock, which forms part of the mountain... In the photo, you can see water and I was taking the photo standing on the small bridge... I have no idea how they were climbing on that rock to create all this, but it looked much better in real life than in photos...

On that day, we went a bit earlier to visit the Christmas Fair, and we were lucky to find an organized guided tour around the town! But, as I had too many photos, I had to split them into two posts... As we are in Christmas time, this part is more important and I will try to publish the rest in another post...

I will go deeper into the story of the town itself in the next post, but to get the context, Jijona is famous for its turrón, which is a soft (sometimes not that soft... lol...) nougat whose origins began exactly in that town! Originally, it was prepared mainly from almonds, but nowadays, there are many crazy combinations with different flavors and recipes... Why almonds? This whole area is very popular for its almond plantations and I was creating a couple of posts with photos of almond trees in blossom...

This was a Christmas tree in front of the Townhouse... and I have no idea who are the kids in the photo... I was waiting for them to go away, but other will appear, so I had to take a shot... 😂

What you can see in this photo is the beginning of the street and the Christmas fair... I have no idea how many stands were, but 80-90% of them were selling turrón!!! Roughly, I would say that there were around 60-80 stands (or even more)! Knowing that the small town has a population of around 7000 souls, this means that almost every family had its own turrón business! Forgot to mention that all sellers were from the town!!! Amazing!

As I said in the beginning, we came to town a bit earlier and used that time to walk around the city center where I took these interesting photos of a decorated square with knitted things!!! So, you could see a beautifully decorated bench...

... or this mailbox with a cute winter hat!!! How cool is that?!

Even this tree got warm, winter clothes on! 😃

As this was a small, fenced square, there were a lot of these small knitted items hanging all around... a sock, a hat, ice cream, fruits, etc...

When we finished the walk around the town and the fair, it was already dark and we got hungry... On the way back to the car, we found another small parking lot that was converted into the "food truck fair"... Exactly what we were searching for!!!