The spendings of Holy Week

It’s hardly penitence when it comes to the economy of Holy Week in Spain. The people of Sevilla, Spain, spare no expense when it comes to making the Easter processions of holy week the most elaborate and grand in all of Spain. This week is a major tourism week for Spain, and specifically for Sevilla. The hotels and restaurants are filled to the brim as well as the streets with tourists and locals celebrating the festivities of holy week. This year Sevilla brought in an estimated 160 million € from the processions of holy week. This amount does not even include the added value to the city in tourism promotion.
Each Brotherhood spent an average of 73,000 € to prepare their thrones for the processions. What is a Brotherhood? The Brotherhoods are associations of members of the parish who organize themselves to celebrate holy week with processions. Every Brotherhood dedicates itself to a certain scene, e.g. the burial of Christ, the taking of Christ’s body off the cross, the flogging of Christ by Roman soldiers, the judgment of Christ by Pilate, etc. As such, they also perform specific functions during the holy week. For example, the Brotherhood of Death and Resurrection of the Lord will be the one to first announce resurrection on Saturday midnight. And the three grenadier Brotherhoods dedicated to the Virgin will take to the streets on Friday of Pain – the day commemorating the Pain of the Mother. Put together in one procession, they develop the whole story of the Passion before your eyes, in a sequence of frames.
Some other major expenses of holy week include the cost of the carvings and statues, the floral decorations of the "palo", and the tunics worn by the brotherhood. The maintenance of the statues and carvings used in holy week average a spending of about 5.2 million € a year. Although many of the tunics in Sevilla are either purchased on the black market, or sewn by families, an average of 600,000 € is still declared each year from tunics. Then their is the high cost of the floral decorations mainly used to decorate the "Palo". Each brotherhood spends an average of 2,200 to 4,000 € a year on flowers used to decorate the "Palo". The processions of Holy Week are highly important to the culture of Spain as well as to their tourist industry.