People start arriving up to the Friday before, and leave again on Tuesday. The pilgrimage takes place over the weekend before Pentecost Monday, the seventh weekend after Easter Sunday, that is to say 50 days after Easter Sunday (See box at top of this page). These brotherhoods also stay at their houses at weekends throughout the year, with their families in tow, making each visit into a big fiesta. And lots of singing and dancing, at all hours of the day and night. There are impromptu parties, open-air masses, horse races and competitions between the hermandades. People bring mattresses and bed down anywhere they can. Its members and their friends and families, and their horses, eat and sleep here during the pilgrimage weekend. Now, each of the 90 or so brotherhoods has its own house with stables, as well as its own chapel, with its name displayed at the front. Until the 1950s the town had only a few houses, and everyone camped in their wagons. For a few days in late May or early June, Catholic hermandades (brotherhoods) and countless others flock from all over Andalucia, Spain, and beyond, to the town, to pay tribute to the Virgin del Roció, housed in her own church in the town. You can tie your horse to a wooden rail with a sign saying " Reservado Caballos" (reserved for horses) while you have a drink or a meal), with sandy, unpaved roads (easier on the hooves). The town of El Rocío is a sprawling, pretty Wild-West-style place. Most pilgrims, known as rocieros, approach the town through the park itself. El Rocio is in Huelva province, in the heart of the Doñana park, between Almonte and the coast. The object of the pilgrimage is a 13th-century statue of the Virgen Del Rocio (Virgin of the Dew), in the town of the same name.
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