The story
Fiestas Patronales de Barva in Barva
Fiestas Patronales de Barva honors San Bartolome Apostol around August 24 with a century-old celebration built around two locally specific customs, an unusually large mask-making effort of 1,000 to 1,500 masks by roughly thirty local makers, and vejigas, inflated pig bladders batted through the crowd, alongside the usual turno of food stalls and cimarrona-led masquerades.
Barva's patron saint festival, held around August 24 in honor of San Bartolome Apostol, is built on a custom found nowhere else in this cluster of Costa Rican town festivals: vejigas, inflated pig bladders, that participants stretch with pressurized water and then blow up with air to bat around the crowd in mock combat.