Fiesta Modernista Teruel · When a City Steps Back in Time

Every autumn, something remarkable happens in Teruel. The city doesn't simply remember its past. It begins to live it again.

The streets surrounding Plaza del Torico—and, in recent years, Plaza de San Juan—fill with elegant ladies carrying lace parasols, gentlemen tipping their hats in greeting, musicians performing, and families dressed as though they have stepped out of another century. For a few days, Teruel's beautiful Modernist buildings become more than architecture. They become the backdrop to the world they were built to inhabit.

The Fiesta Modernista celebrates the artistic and cultural movement that flourished across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Through music, theater, dance, and historical reenactments, the people of Teruel transform their city into a living stage. Yet what has always captivated me most isn't the costumes or the performances. It's the people.

As I wandered through the streets with my camera, I found myself drawn less to the staged moments than to the ones unfolding naturally between them. A gentleman carefully adjusting his hat before greeting friends. A child proudly wearing period clothing for the first time. Musicians waiting quietly before the music began.

These small moments revealed something no performance could capture. The genuine affection the people of Teruel have for their own history.

I first photographed the Fiesta Modernista in 2012, never imagining it would become one of the longest documentary projects of my career. With the exception of 2020, when the pandemic paused the festival, I returned every year through 2023.

Looking back through those photographs, I realized I had documented far more than an annual celebration. Children I photographed in their first costumes returned years later as young adults. Familiar faces appeared again and again. Every autumn became another chapter in the story of a city that chooses not simply to preserve its history, but to live it.

In 2024, that body of work became Modernismo: A Retrospective, my second solo exhibition in Teruel. What began as a personal documentary project had quietly become part of the festival's own history.

After more than a decade photographing the Fiesta Modernista, I came to understand that heritage isn't preserved by buildings alone.

It survives because communities choose to celebrate it, inhabit it, and pass it from one generation to the next. The photographs became a reminder that history isn't only something we remember. Sometimes, we step inside it.