800 years of university have marked Salamanca City with the student ambient along with history, sometimes this brings some traditions as weird as real. Today we are going to tell you the history of the Father Bitches (with no coma between).
Times have changed, and nowadays student's image is quite different than it was in the middle age. While today students are people like all other ones with mostly no money on their pockets, in the XVI century students were wealthy people who move a whole industry and society around to maintain them.
Pues si hoy en día las fiestas universitarias ya son tan relevantes que pueden atraer hasta a 35.000 personas en un solo día en aquel tiempo la industria del ocio en salamanca con estudiantes, que además tenían dinero trascendía las líneas de lo que se pueda escribir. Se ha llegado a describir a salamanca como una Sodoma o Gomorra. El alcohol, los bares de alterne y la prostitución alcanzaban números escandalosos al nivel de lo que hoy en día se esperaría encontrar en ciudades como las vegas, pero en la época medieval.
In that last case, the situation was so notorious that when king Felipe II visited the city to get married and found such a show ordered that prostitutes had to leave the city and don’t get closer for the lent period but coming back next Monday after Holy week ending.
En este momento nace el lunes de aguas. Es el lunes en el que las prostitutas volvían a la ciudad, después de pasar un mes y medio en la otra orilla del rio. Ese día los estudiantes iban a recibirlas con vino y comida (habitualmente hornazos) invitándolas a beber y comer. Durante este evento aparece la figura de el Padre Lucas, apodado Padre Putas por los estudiantes quien se encargaba de cruzar el rio en una barca con las mujeres.
The party marked by alcohol and sex ends in a bath in the river by the people participating in the party that was celebrating the ending of the religious penance period, or at least this what it is told up today…
Nowadays the party has turned out into a nonworking countryside day trip performed by both students and families meeting for eating and drinking, young people at the bank and families at their homes or any other place of the outback.
