September 2026
Calling this feature of Pedrafita’s municipal calendar the ‘Fair of the Year’ rather suggests that there are other fairs, and indeed, there are twelve, held on the 5th and the 21st of each month, irrespective of Sundays, public holidays, the season or the weather. Today they are roughly equivalent to the ‘Farmers’ Markets’ popular in Canada and the UK, but when I moved to this area in 2010, Pedrafita’s twice-monthly fairs still included the buying and selling of livestock and poultry. I recall being impressed by the variety of animals on show, many belonging to native breeds I’d never seen before.
All that changed about ten years ago, when competition for space and the difficulty of holding fairs outdoors in bad weather shifted the balance towards clothing and foodstuffs, sold under shelter. The result was that the livestock element that had occupied the huge sheds since time immemorial became the centrepiece of the second fair in September, renamed ‘La Feria del Año’. There’s lots of produce, too, but it’s the animals that now make this fair special. To see them, I drove down to Pedrafita early, while calm still reigned: I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.
