LUCBAN, QUEZON—An estimated 15,000 participants gathered to be splashed and soaked wet with water, while swaying, dancing and merrymaking at the Buhusaya Music Festival here on Easter Sunday.
The festival kicked off around 8 a.m. on April 1, with a multisectoral grand parade led by Mayor Celso Olivier T. Dator accompanied by Rep. Trina Enverga of the First District of Quezon, Vice Mayor Armando Abutal and Sangguniang Bayan member Arnel Abcede were also present when the parade went around the town proper.
Water was being splashed and poured from everywhere on the participants who gamely took it from residents standing and waiting on the roadside with their buckets, water containers and water toy guns as the grand parade passed by.
Dator, Enverga, Abutal and Abcede were soaking wet along with thousands of parade participants who ended at the town plaza in front of the municipal building.
The participants, some of them from the neighboring provinces of Laguna, Batangas and Metro Manila, rapidly grew in number as the party started in earnest around noon with water gushing from the water hoses of three firetrucks and artificial foam being emitted from a device with nonstop dance music pounding and adding to the excitement and frenzy of the crowd.
The festival is named this year as Buhusaya Festival 2018. It started four years ago as an event after the weeklong observance of Holy Week. Named then as Buhusan Festival, it is now being considered as an addition to the town’s main tourist draw called Pahiyas Festival, a monthlong cultural event in May, here which, helped make the town included in the country’s tourism map.
“Lucban has become the number 7 pilgrim site worldwide as per information of the Department of Tourism for 2018,” Dator, 38, told the BusinessMirror.
Image credits: John Bello