In July 2019, when the coronavirus pandemic was inconceivable, more than 20,000 people gathered around the dock of Cross port to celebrate the last edition of the boat of the Virgen del Carmen and San Telmo. Three years later, after the break forced by the Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, the tourist city is preparing to meet again this Tuesday, July 12, 2022 with the most important day of its Great Celebrations of July. From seven in the morning, with the flowery reveille, the tourist city recovers, with all its acts, the day most awaited by the people of Porto.
Groups of families and friends will take position on the dock very early. At nine o’clock in the morning there will be the Eucharist in honor of the Virgin of Carmen next to the pier. At 10:00 a.m., the traditional hot chocolate and the championships of dominoes, cards and children’s fishing. At 11:00, Ecos del Carmen Folk Festival at the Santa Bárbara Battery. After several hours of celebration and coexistence on the pier, which is filled with boats like on no other day of the year, at three in the afternoon The show of the Great Cockagne returns. A huge trunk covered in fat that the most daring slide down to try to capture one of the flags that are located at its end.
During the day, two ways of celebrating the boat coexist: one more familiar and calm, and another more festive and youthful, which in recent editions have coexisted again without incident. In the afternoon, the moments of greatest religious fervor arrive. The solemn Eucharist, in which numerous local, island and regional authorities are expected, will be at 5:30 p.m. in the Mother Parish of Our Lady of Peña de Francia. At the end, the most awaited moment: the land and sea procession of Our Lady of Carmen and San Telmo through the church square and Quintana, Santo Domingo and La Marina streets. It is expected to start around 6:30 p.m.
The short journey to the pier usually takes up to almost two hours, between cheers for the virgin, a shower of petals, compliments, promises, songs and babies and children who offer themselves to the image. On the pier, surrounded by thousands of people, they will meet San Telmo and the Virgen del Carmen to listen to a musical offering in which the town crier of 2022, ChagoMelián, will move with the Ave Maria.
It will embark first to San Telmo, probably between eight and nine, and the excitement will boil over as the porters enter the sea to board the Queen of the Seas. Everyone hopes that, as it had been until 2019, people will splash excitedly again while chanting the long-awaited “nothing happens, the virgin is on board!”. At night, the procession returns to the port to go through the streets of Mequinez, La Peñita, El Lomo, Villanueva, San Felipe and La Marina, where it will receive, next to the sea, another offering in the form of a pyrotechnic display before returning to the parish.
Reunion with the Great Power of God
On Sunday, July 10 and Monday, July 11, 2022, Puerto de la Cruz once again devotedly celebrated its reunion with the Great Power of God. Both in the night procession and on this Monday of thanksgiving, with the intervention of the Choir of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the military band of the infantry regiment No. 49 of Tenerife, hundreds of people from Porto and visitors greeted the image of Jesus of the Great Power of God.
