The Maruxaina
Every second Saturday in August, the fishing village of San Cibrao goes out to sea to look for a mermaid, brings her to O Torno beach and puts her on trial in front of the whole village. She is always acquitted.
What is the Maruxaina?
Since 1985, San Cibrao has been celebrating the Maruxaina: an old seafaring legend that the village decided to stage, with its own people, every second Saturday in August.
According to tradition the Maruxaina lives on the islets of Os Farallóns off the coast, and even the neighbours disagree about her: some say she is a mermaid jealous of the fishermen’s wives, who lures them away with her song, and others that she is a kind old woman who warns them of storms. Nobody disputes that the trial the village holds every year always ends the same way.
The fishermen and the women go out to sea with the village lights turned off, sounding horns and foghorns so as not to hear the siren’s song, and come back to O Torno beach with the figure of the Maruxaina amid fireworks. The trial begins on the beach and continues in the village square, in the Gran Xuízo Popular, where the prosecutor, the defence and the townspeople act as the jury. The verdict is always the same: she is acquitted, and the sentence orders the party to carry on: a big queimada popular in Praza dos Campos and dancing until dawn.
Entry is free, and the festival has been declared a Festival of Galician Tourist Interest since 2003.
According to the Xunta de Galicia’s listing, the neighbours disagree about the Maruxaina’s character, and in recent decades the legend has also drawn on the shipwrecks off this coast.
