Boys in the Hood

Easter, a holiday celebrated with colored eggs and chocolate bunnies, isn't the somber Christian festival it once was. But tradition lives on in Seville, Spain, where Holy Week is dominated by cross-bearing penitents and processions of 300-year-old, immaculately decorated pasos , or floats, borne on the shoulders of worshippers. For seven days and nights, the narrow streets of old Seville are traversed by more than 120 processions, each led by a group of hooded devotees known as Nazarenos. The floats, which take weeks to prepare and often weigh several tons each, display biblical figures or saints (notably La Virgen Macarena, the...