The Mejorana Festival

The Festival Nacional de la Mejorana was first held in 1949, led by the Guararé-born folklorist Manuel F. Zárate, and it has run every September since; it is the most important meeting of Panamanian folklore. Groups come from every province to compete in tamborito, cumbia, décima singing and mejorana playing, there are parades of decorated oxcarts, hundreds of women in full pollera, and a competition for the best. It runs for about five days around the twenty-fourth of September, the town's patron day, and it is a genuinely national event rather than a regional one.

History

The festival grew out of Guararé's centuries-old devotion to the Virgen de las Mercedes, whose feast falls on 24 September; the image in the parish church today was commissioned in 1912 by the local priest from a Spanish sculptor working in La Villa de Los Santos. Its founder, Manuel Fernando Zárate (1899-1968), was born in Guararé, trained as a teacher and as a chemical engineer in Paris, ran the laboratory of Panama City's Santo Tomás Hospital and, with his wife Dora Pérez de Zárate, spent his life studying Panamanian folklore. By the account told in Guararé, the first festival in 1949 was the couple's thanks after a test showed that their daughter did not have the leukaemia the doctors had feared. A bill to make it a national festival of Panamanian tradition was put forward in 1955, and since 2022 it has had a yearly budget of $25,000 from the Ministry of Culture (Spanish Wikipedia, Festival de la Mejorana; Spanish Wikipedia, Manuel Zárate).

What's there

• The competitions - folk groups from every province in dance and music.
• The oxcart parade - decorated carts through the town.
• Polleras in numbers - hundreds of them, competing and worn.
• Décima singing - improvised verse contests in the fixed form.

When to go

Around the twenty-fourth of September for about five days. Accommodation in Guararé is very limited; most visitors stay in Las Tablas or Chitré and drive in. Events run from afternoon into the night.

What to expect

Guararé is a small town and has almost no accommodation, so this means staying elsewhere and driving. It is hot, crowded and runs late. The competitions are long and in Spanish with no interpretation. Programmes are published locally and shift.

Nearby

Las Tablas is ten minutes; Chitré is twenty minutes north.