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Why the same devils, dances and fire keep turning up across the island's summer fiestas — and where to stand to see them.
Watch enough Mallorcan fiestas and you start to see the same cast: a horned devil, a line of ribboned dancers, a crowd running under sparks. This is a short field guide to the island's three recurring fiesta rituals — the Cossiers dance, the Moros i Cristians mock battle, and the fire of the correfoc and the dimonis — and to four fiestas where you can see them in the flesh: Montuïri's Sant Bartomeu, Pollença's La Patrona, Santa Margalida's Beata, and Alaró's Sant Antoni. (Alaró's Sant Roc adds cossiers and a correfoc in one August night, if you want both at once.)
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Watch enough Mallorcan fiestas and you start to see the same cast. A devil in a horned mask. A line of dancers in ribbons and bells. A crowd running under a rain of sparks. These aren't decoration bolted onto a saint's day — they are the fiesta, older in many cases than the churches they now circle, and they recur from village to village because they all answer the same question: how does a town act out good against evil, and survive it, once a year?
In Montuïri, the answer is the Cossiers. Six dancers with coloured ribbons and sprigs of basil circle a Dama (the Lady) while a Dimoni (the Devil) tries to break in and tempt her; good always wins. It is the only such troupe on the island to have danced without interruption, documented since 1821, and it takes the plaça for Sant Bartomeu on 24 and 25 August.
“The devil is never the villain of the fiesta. He is the reason there's a fiesta at all.”
Point the same lens at Pollença and the fight becomes literal: for La Patrona on 2 August the town splits into Moors and Christians and re-stages a corsair raid through its streets. In Santa Margalida, the Festa de la Beata on the first Sunday of September sends demons chasing a procession, snatching clay pots to smash at the Beata's feet. And in Alaró, Sant Antoni's mid-January night is pure fire — bonfires, dimonis and a correfoc running sparks over the crowd. Different saints, different months, the same three ingredients.
You don't need to follow all four to get it — but do stand close enough once to feel the drum in your chest and the heat off a fogueró. Here's where the devils, the dancers and the fire are this year.
