[spanish music]
NARRATOR: San Pedro Manrique,
Spain, June 23, 2018.
Here, as they have
for centuries,
villagers gather for
an evening festival
to celebrate the
summer solstice.
They engage in singing, dancing,
wearing elaborate costumes.
But for a select
group of villagers,
the festivities
aren't so conventional
because their
evening also includes
something out of the ordinary,
a dangerous walk over fire.
Now, I've seen
many fire-walking
rituals in many
different contexts
in a variety of countries.
They have this
amphitheater around the place
where the actual fire is.
Then these men
walk on the embers.
It's five or six steps
from one side to the other,
and they do it barefoot
and usually carrying
someone on their shoulder.
People often wonder, is
the fire walk really hot?
And the answer is yes.
Once the wood is first laid
out, the overall temperature
is between 1,000
and 1,200 degrees.
That's really hot, more
than enough to burn flesh,
certainly.
If you look at their
temperatures involved,
you're typically
talking temperatures
over a thousand degrees
Fahrenheit, and skin burns
at 100, 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
Walking on fire is
very, very dangerous.
I mean, you're barefoot.
Just one wrong move, and
you can be severely burned.
So do rituals really work?
Well, many of us
certainly believe they do,
even if we don't know how.
Whether it's to acquire
superhuman abilities
or to ward off evil, rituals
help to connect us to a world
very different from our own.
It's a world of the spiritual.
It's a world of
the supernatural.
It's a world of the unexplained.
