The Funeral of the Anchovy: Málaga’s Unique Way of Ending Carnival

It is half past six on a Sunday in mid-February, that tender hour when the weekend hesitates between rest and return to productivity. You go out for a walk to clear your thoughts. The light over the port is bright, the wind sharpened by winter, families orbiting one another.

And then you see it.

A giant anchovy, solemn, magnificent, faintly absurd, advancing toward the beach. There are musicians, and figures dressed in mourning, and the unmistakable atmosphere of ceremony disguised as comedy. Something is ending, and the city wants to make sure you feel it.

If you come from elsewhere in Spain, you might expect a sardine. That is the broader tradition. Carnival, having allowed the world to turn upside down for a few intoxicating days, must eventually restore gravity. And so towns stage a funeral. They parade a symbolic fish through the streets with theatrical grief and irreverent humour, and at the end they burn or bury it, to escort excess out of the body by ritual.

What is being laid to rest is not really the fish. It is permission, noise, the temporary suspension of consequence. In surrendering it to flames or earth, a community acknowledges the ancient rhythm between indulgence and order. Lent approaches and reflection re-enters the room.

The ceremony is both satire and psychological wisdom. It allows people to close a door together. It gives shape to the otherwise invisible movement from celebration back into structure. It reminds everyone that renewal sometimes requires a goodbye dramatic enough to be believed.

But Málaga, being Málaga, does not bury a sardine. It buries a boquerón. Of course it does.

The fish that became a nickname

Here the anchovy is both food and biography. Fried, marinated, laid across plates in beach bars, carried home in paper cones, remembered from childhood summers, the boquerón is intimacy you can eat. Over time, it became shorthand for local pride. Malagueños themselves are affectionately called boquerones.

So when Carnival needed a creature to represent the drama of ending and beginning again, the choice was obvious. You burn what you love. You let it go so life can move.

A funeral that laughs while it cries

Every year a giant anchovy is constructed, monumental, theatrical, intentionally excessive. It is carried in procession from the city centre toward Playa de La Malagueta, accompanied by music, banners, and an entire staged mourning.

There are figures dressed as widows in black lace, professional weepers for the afternoon. Laments are performed with devotion and a wink. Tragedy is exaggerated, but the farewell is real.

Because something is, in fact, ending. Carnival is not just masks, music and confetti, it is a temporary rearrangement of permission. For a handful of days the rules soften, noise becomes virtue, exaggeration becomes normal. When it closes, the return to ordinary time carries a faint but perceptible loss.

So the city gives the ending a body. It carries it through the streets. It gathers to watch it disappear. And in the flames, people recognise a truth they know well: that every intensity, however joyous, eventually asks to be released and re-balanced.

The Boquerón as editorial

The fish is never neutral. Each year its body is used to carry the emotional residue of the months that preceded it: politics, economic pressures, public fatigue, shared irritations, the atmosphere of the times. What moves through the streets is therefore a large, mobile cartoon through which the city comments on itself.

Yes, it is ritual. But it is argument too.

The 2026 Boquerón, created by Málaga artist Fernando Wilson, adopted an explicitly pacifist position. Banners called for peace. The imagery insisted that the only battle worth staging is the playful one, the traditional war of flowers, a carnival parade in which participants throw petals and confetti at one another.

The message was easy to understand: Let destruction be confined to theatre. Let daily life practice a different ethic.

My experience

I ran into the procession just as the boquerón was passing beneath the Muelle Uno bridge, and for a moment the entire parade stalled. The figure was too tall; its hat and tail had to be removed so it could clear the structure. Members of the crew moved through the crowd carrying these enormous pieces like ceremonial furniture.

One of them turned, misjudged the distance, and the boquerón’s hat knocked gently against some of us, including my head. No harm done. I took it immediately as a piece of luck, a sign that this year renewal might arrive without subtlety.

By the time we reached Playa de La Malagueta, thousands of people were already gathered, waiting for the procession to arrive. The shoreline felt charged with expectation.

And when the fish was finally set alight, I felt myself step into the shared decision unfolding around me, the agreement to end something together. To release what had been heavy. To laugh at it, mourn it, exaggerate it, carry it on shoulders, and finally surrender it to smoke.

Together.

It felt like a collective nervous system exhaling at the same time, a public closing of a chapter. Now comes a fresh start: fewer illusions, more intention, step by step.

Love from Málaga,
Val