My love for nativity scenes

Christmas are approaching, as it is my favorite time of the year. I like Christmas not for the presents, or having holidays, neither for the succulent meals (although this is the second reason) but because of the Nativity Scenes. I'm not a religious person, however, I love how everybody sets their little houses, trees and characters in order to create a scene. My passion for models, maquettes and dioramas gets fulfilled just by walking on the streets and watching how almost every store has their model of their own representation of the Belen.

My favorite ones are the interpretations, when people recreate the scene with creative things, and built a narrative withing it. In my hometown Vitoria, there is a church that since 1987 hosts all kind of Nativity Scenes which change every Christmas, and year after year I go to take a look. This collection of unusual Nativity Scenes was featured in the city journal, the article is in Spanish.

This year, the one that caught my attention was one solely interpreted with Smurfs, even featuring the mushroom like shaped constructions.

Image credit. Gasteiz Hoy

Last weekend, I traveled to Cuenca with my parents, and unknowingly we ended up in the Nativity Scene Museum of San Clemente. Among other, it hosts a 36 m2 scene, featuring 70 figures of around 30 cm made of policromad clay. It recreates Napoles at XVIII century. It is the biggest there, and walking into the room to admire it's really shocking.

On the other hand, they have scenes so much smaller, like this one, created by craving a pumpkin and setting it inside of it. There is also a display showing how puppets are on the inside.

I specially liked this set for it's use of different size models in order to create the feeling of huge perspective, which works wonders, in fact the display was barely 20 cm wide and it doesn't show.

Most of the scenes in this museum features figures with the same size, usually portralling the Nativity Scene Canonically. This means that there would be a cave or similar hosting the baby, Mary and Josep, the Tree Kings on the way to visit them and shepherds preparing offerings. What I didn't expect was to find a Nativity Scene inside of another one, which actually happened, and you can see that the mini scene is super detailed even being so tiny.

The only piece that I hated was this one on the right. The angels "falling" on a stream, the out of proportion king, the scattered sea shells... C'mon!

All in all, I recommend visiting this Nativity Scene Museum of San Clemente in Cuenca, since it's quite interesting without being boring, there's plenty of variety and it's free!