Leogane

Léogâne sits on the plain west of Port-au-Prince and is the acknowledged capital of rara: the processional street music of bamboo trumpets, drums and voices that moves through towns from Lent into Easter week, band by band, on foot, all night. During Holy Week the town fills with bands from across the region and the streets do not empty until morning. The rest of the year Léogâne is a working agricultural town that was near the epicentre of the 2010 earthquake.

History

When Europeans arrived in 1492, Yaguana, today's Léogâne, was the capital of Jaragua, one of the five chiefdoms of Hispaniola and the last to hold out against the Spanish, until the Taíno queen Anacaona, born in the town, was captured and killed in 1503. In 1592 an English privateer fleet under Christopher Newport took and burned the town, and under the French, whose buccaneers gradually settled western Hispaniola, the governor Jean-Baptiste du Casse renamed it Léogâne in the 1690s, keeping traces of the Taíno name; on 12 January 2010 it was at the epicentre of the earthquake, with 80 to 90% of its buildings damaged (Wikipedia, Léogâne).

What to look for

• The rara bands - processions of bamboo trumpets, drums and singers through the streets.
• Holy Week - the peak of the season, when bands come in from the whole region.
• The plain - sugar and farming country running from the mountains to the sea.
• The town - rebuilt in large part since 2010, when the epicentre was close by.

When to go

Holy Week is the reason to come and the town is unrecognisable then, running through the night. The season builds from Lent onwards. Outside it, November to March is the comfortable window and the town is ordinary.

What to expect

Rara is a street event without schedules, tickets or fixed routes: you follow a band or you miss it. Crowds are dense and go all night, and it is not an event to attend alone as an outsider without a local companion. Accommodation in town is minimal.

Nearby

Port-au-Prince is half an hour east, and Jacmel is over the mountains to the south.

Key facts