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Europe|A Glow-Up Gone Awry
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/world/europe/spain-seville-macarena-restoration.html
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The Macarena needed to get some work done.
On this, many in Seville, a city with a die-hard devotion to a sorrowful 17th-century wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, agreed. In June, members of the Brotherhood of the Macarena, entrusted for centuries with protecting the image, sent her out from her shrine for some touch ups. But the Macarena — pronounced just like the song belted by a local duo that conquered ballparks and bar mitzvahs throughout the 1990s — came back from a restorer’s workshop with a full eye job.
Her glow-up gave her longer lashes, a smokier look in her gaze and changes to her skin and nose. Outrage among locals, many wearing Macarena medallions and bracelets, spread to Seville tapas bars adorned with Macarena posters, where television sets play the Macarena’s pre-Easter procession on a continuous loop.
“It was not good work,” Salvador Fernández, 84, a longtime brotherhood member, said with anguish on a recent morning after bowing before the Macarena, who wept her glass tears in the high altar in the basilica that bears her name.
“It was like she got makeup,” his wife, Consuelo Murga, 75, said. “And the Macarena cannot be made up!”
More than a makeover gone awry, the botched restoration has become the scandal of Seville’s summer, injecting infighting and political instability into the 18,000-strong brotherhood, one of the scores of religious groups connected to various sacred images entrenched in Seville culture. It also has inflamed southern resentments against northerners who, learning of the outcry, have mocked Seville’s folkloric ways.
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