Holy Week Valladolid

Valladolid's Holy Week processions carry sculptures by Gregorio Fernandez and other masters of the city's sixteenth and seventeenth-century polychrome wood-carving school through the historic center, a tradition recognized as a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest and paired with the Museo Nacional de Escultura's major permanent collection of the same artistic school.

Valladolid's Holy Week is defined less by scale than by the artistic weight of what is actually carried through its streets: the city was a principal center of Spanish polychrome religious sculpture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, home to Gregorio Fernandez and other sculptors whose dramatically realistic wooden figures of Christ and the Passion remain in active devotional use during the processions rather than confined to museum display.