OUR FIRST PUBLICATIONS

One of the issues to which we have always dedicated special attention since the founding of the Commission to Promote the Bonfires of San Juan in 1971, and even before, in 1970, with the creation of the Meiga Mayor Youth Group, was, not only, the dissemination of our activities, but also that of the festival and the customs and traditions that revolve around the night of San Juan.

Already in the last quarter of 1970, our first newsletter was published, which we baptized with the name “Meiga Mayor” and whose numbers came out overflowing with ink, from the “Vietnamese” of the Parish of Saint Pius the last three months of that year and the first six of 1971, with a good part of the girls and boys who formed the board of directors of our Group participating as editors.

It was a kind of organ of expression, in which we told a little about our associative realities and a lot about our dreams and projects, through articles and comments, many of them full of subtlety and good humor.

In 1971, the creation of the Promoting Commission of the Bonfires of San Juan, resulted in the change of the header of our Bulletin, which was renamed “Aquelarre”, maintaining its reason for being and its structure, also changing the “rotary”, beginning to use the electric multicopier of the Compañía Asturiana de Minas.

With long periods of disappearance, this Bulletin has survived to this day, published in digital format and of which a total of fifteen issues are published each year, twelve monthly and three extraordinary ones on the occasion of San Juan, Christmas and the Election of the Meiga Mayor .

For many years we entertained the idea of taking to the streets a larger publication that would serve, on the one hand, as a dissemination medium for our program, and on the other, as a means to disseminate the customs and traditions associated with the night of San Juan. However, such publication had to wait a few years to become a reality.

In 1972, we published our first HOGUERAS poster, which would become a constant throughout the years, reaching the present day.

Drawings and photographs, some of them by famous cartoonists, constituted, during these fifty years, the central themes of the posters, whose collection constitutes part of the historical collection of our Promotion Commission of which we feel especially proud.

Even during these first years, Begano S.A., Coca-Cola bottler in our city, printed a series of partial posters of some of our events that served to better disseminate them.

It was in 1977, when we turned to the Schweppes soft drink company, which had a bottling plant in the neighboring Polígono de Sabón, to finance our project to publish a publication and thus be able to make it a reality.

After presenting our demands to his head of the advertising area, he accepted our proposal and in this way, that year, with the help of the magnificent cartoonist and friend, Joaquín Castiñeiras Bermúdez, the first HOGUERAS publication hit the streets, experiencing it when we saw it. , all of us, a feeling of indescribable emotion.

Published in page format and with a full color cover, its content basically consisted of the enumeration of the events to take place in those HOGUERAS, accompanied by some background articles and, of course, the photography of Isabel Ruso de Lago, Meiga Major 1977.

Since that year, the HOGUERAS publication never stopped hitting the streets, adopting years later, specifically in 1984, the A-4 format and the full color edition, always featuring the general poster of the year on its cover.

Nor can we forget that nice little newsletter that, under the title of “She” we published throughout most of the editions of the Sports Week and that constituted, so to speak, the organ of expression and the voice of the Week , coming to light, each year, a total of seven copies that were distributed among the participants.

As the years went by, our publications reached greater scope and thus the magazine “HOGUERAS” significantly improved its presentation and content, exhibition catalogs and even books were published, but we will talk about this another time.

Eugenio Fernández Barallobre.