El Colacho: Spain's Baby Jumping Festival and Its Clash With the Vatican

Picture laying your newborn on a mattress in the middle of a village street and watching a man in a red and yellow devil costume leap over them while the crowd cheers. This episode travels to Castrillo de Murcia in the Spanish province of Burgos to unpack El Colacho, the baby jumping festival that dates back to 1620, and explains why what looks like reckless endangerment is, to the families involved, a profound act of communal protection.

The conversation describes the sensory assault of the devil roaming the village with a whip and oversized castanets, the arrival of the Atabalero drummers that flips the spiritual power dynamic and sends him fleeing along the procession route, and the theology of the jump itself: the devil absorbing the babies' original sin and carrying it out of town. It then covers the Brotherhood of the Blessed Sacrament of Minerva that organizes the Corpus Christi week, the infant mortality fears of the 17th century, and why Pope Benedict XVI asked Spanish priests to distance themselves from a ritual that bypasses baptism.

Why the jump is best understood as the devil being chased out of town rather than attacking the infantsThe tension between institutional doctrine and localized folk religionHow the ritual is believed to guard against illness, evil spirits and even herniasWhy in Costa Rica El Colacho means Santa Claus, a nickname derived from Nicolacho and St. NicholasA closing challenge to consider which of your own traditions would sound just as strange to an outsider