Every year in June the Santo António celebrations take place in Lisbon, peaking around the 12th of the month with the traditional parade and Santo António weddings.
Throughout June many other cultural and popular events are held to pay homage to the Patron Saint, believed to bless marriages, with grilled sardines being a typical dish at this time of year.
And the affair is not just a mere celebration; the entire capital and the many thousands of people who flock to Lisbon to take part in the festivities burst into full-on party mode that can last for days on end.
Last weekend the capital exploded with music and colour as the celebrations reached a crescendo.
On Sunday, sixty floats paraded throughout the capital as part of the city’s Popular Marches, the high point of the wider festivities along with the Santo António weddings.
A competition for the best float was won by the Alfama neighbourhood, followed by Penha de França in second, and Alto do Pina in third.
The other major traditional event to occur during the Saint Anthony celebrations are the Santo António weddings, which took place in Lisbon on Sunday.
Established in the 1950s by the now-extinct Diário Popular newspaper, the Santo António weddings were created to offer the city’s most economically-disadvantaged young couples the opportunity of fulfilling their dreams of tying the knot, in a mass ceremony.
Now organised by Lisbon council, every year 16 couples who pass a thorough selection process are given the wedding of their dreams – albeit in a mass ceremony – with everything from the dresses to the shoes, the cakes and the honeymoons being provided by sponsors.
The tradition was interrupted with the onset of the Revolution in 1974, but brought back some three decades later.
On Sunday, at 10.30am, 11 young couples got married in a mass church ceremony, followed by five civil marriages later that afternoon at 2.15pm.
At 3pm the newly-wedded couples paraded from the Town Hall towards the Eduardo VII Park where the wedding breakfast took place in the garden’s greenhouse.
For more information on other events happening in and around Lisbon this month, see: http://festasdelisboa.com.