There is a moment, just before the horses arrive, when the crowd stops talking. The band is still playing — the fandangos are always playing — but something shifts in the air of Alaior's main square. A collective holding of breath. And then the first horse appears at the far end, eyes wide, nostrils flared, and the square erupts.
The Jaleo is one of Menorca's oldest traditions: a festival in which horses run through dense, pressing crowds, their riders urging them to stand on their hind legs while the people below raise their hands to steady them. It sounds, on paper, like something that should not still exist. But it does, every August, in every village on the island.
Crowds gather before the start of the Sant Llorenç festivities, Alaior, August 2025
I arrived in the early afternoon, hours before anything was scheduled to happen. The square was nearly empty — a few old men on plastic chairs, a child chasing a pigeon. I walked through it slowly, trying to imagine it full. I had been told it would be completely packed: wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder, no air between bodies. I didn't quite believe it.
The main square in Alaior, hours before the festival begins
The church was already open. A few women were lighting candles inside, their voices low. Outside, a man was assembling speakers with the unhurried efficiency of someone who has done this every year of his adult life. The band started tuning up around five. By six, the first bodies had arrived at the edges of the square, arranging themselves into the familiar choreography of waiting.
The church of Sant Llorenç before the crowds arrive
The local band plays fandangos throughout the night
The horse came so fast I barely had time to raise my camera. I was below it before I understood what had happened.
People gather to welcome the horses at the entrance to the square
What the photographs cannot fully convey is the sound. The fandangos, the stamping of hooves on stone, the roar of the crowd the moment a horse rears. And underneath it all, something older — a frequency that seems to come from the ground itself, from four hundred years of this same ritual in this same square.
Shooting on black-and-white film felt like the only honest choice. The Jaleo exists in another time. Colour would have pulled it back into the present.
A horse stands on its hind legs as the crowd presses in
I misjudged where the horse was going. I raised my camera, pressed the shutter without looking, and got out of there.
