The Feria is Medellín’s biggest annual festival, a ten-day celebration of the city’s flower-growing heritage and the farmers who’ve carried it for generations. At its heart is the Desfile de Silleteros, where hundreds of farmers from the town of Santa Elena walk down the streets of Medellín carrying these massive floral displays called “silletas” on their backs. It’s a living tradition rooted in the early 1800s, when Santa Elena’s growers would carry flowers down the mountainside to sell at Medellín’s markets.
In 1957, Arturo Uribe, a member of the Board of the Office of Development and Tourism, had the idea to organize the first Desfile de Silleteros during the city’s May fair. That first parade featured just 40 silleteros from Santa Elena walking down the narrow streets of Ayacucho and Junín, their vibrant silletas drawing crowds of spectators. The tradition took hold, moving to August a few years later to align with Medellín’s official anniversary as an independent villa on August 2, 1675.
Over the decades, the desfile route has changed, the silletas have grown more elaborate, and the festival around it has expanded to include music, art, and citywide celebrations. But the heart of it, farmers carrying the work of a year on their backs, down the mountains and into the city center, has never changed.
For silleteros, it’s the culmination of a year’s careful work collecting seeds, fighting pests, and nurturing the most delicate of living things. Today’s silleteros, carrying flowers down those same slopes to a cheering crowd is a way to honor their families’ past while transforming it into a source of pride. When we watch the parade today, we’re seeing history still living, breathing, and walking among us. I think it’s a beautiful blend of old and new traditions.
That spirit, of a city that transforms without forgetting, that carries beauty through hard times, that paints itself in living color again and again. It pulses through the whole festival. For a few days, the whole city fills with silletas and stages, music spilling from windows, cumbia bursting from plazas. For that stretch in early August, Medellín wears its silletera heart on its sleeve, and we all get to walk in its beauty together.
