The whole world associates the night of 31 October with Halloween, a celebration that is gaining ground every year in Spain. But long before modern Halloween’s pumpkin heads, witches’ broomsticks and trick or treat, the regions of Spain were already celebrating their own traditions to honour the dead. Many of them have continued into the modern day. 

What’s more, the celebration of Halloween is not at all alien to Spain’s own traditions. Galicia and Asturias, and later other territories on the Iberian Peninsula, celebrated the Celtic rite of Samhain or Samain. Meaning the “end of the world”, it extended as far as the British Isles and Central Europe. The ancient Celts celebrated their New Year to coincide with the end of the harvests and the arrival of winter. It was a night of transition towards the darkness of winter, during which the worlds of the living and dead were thought to come together. To avoid problems with the spirits who returned that night, the living dedicated offerings to them in the form of food and disguised themselves as spirits to confuse them. 

Centuries later, Christianity set the date of All Saints’ Day on 1 November, to replace the pagan traditions derived from Samhain with a religious ritual. But the rites in honour of death have remained very much alive in a great variety of forms across the country. Below are some of the best known. 

The most direct heir of the Celtic Samhain is the festival of Magosto, which is deeply rooted in Galicia, Cantabria, Asturias, Leon, Zamora, Salamanca and Caceres. Magosto is the name of the bonfire prepared to roast chestnuts, around which revellers gather to share them and drink wine, cider and orujo from the final grape harvest. There is also a tradition of leaping over the bonfire to bring good luck and to blacken the face with ash. In some places food is also left as an offering to the dead, who return to their homes to keep warm during the magical night.

In Extremadura a gathering of this kind is called a Chaquetía, an outdoor meal during which people eat chestnuts, pomegranates with sugar and quince jelly, and children go from home to home asking for sweets and fruit. In the Canary Islands they celebrate Los Finaos, which has been transformed from a family meeting around a bonfire to a festival in which the whole town takes part. There too children make the rounds of homes and receive sweets and seasonal fruit. These traditions are similar to the Gaztañerre Eguna (roast chestnut day) in the Basque Country and Navarre, when family and friends meet on the night of 2 November in gastronomic clubs or homes to eat roast chestnuts, snails in sauce and motokil (a pastry made with maize flour).

The modern Castanyada has its origin in a ritual funeral celebration in which the families ate seasonal autumn fruit and sweets while they commemorated their dead. The modern celebration is of great importance in Catalonia, but is also popular in Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Aragon. With the arrival of autumn, small stalls with roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes appear on the streets of Catalonia, while in schools, students make drawings and sing songs in memory of La Castanyera, an old woman who is the prototype of a seller of roast chestnuts. 

Apart from chestnuts, the undoubted stars of Catalan gastronomy on All Saints’ Day are panellets, small marzipan balls with pine nuts and many other ingredients. 

If there is a place that has made an effort to recover its traditions on the Night of the Dead it is undoubtedly Soria. Its Festival de las Ánimas (Festival of Souls) includes eight different ancestral customs in the province, all of them dedicated to death. The main celebration is the Night of the Souls, on 1 November. While the town of Tajueco celebrates the Song of the Souls, a silent procession only broken by the tolling of the bells and the songs of some of the men, the capital city of Soria hosts a unique street show. It is a procession guided by oil lamps and torches, in which skeletons, mediaeval standards, giant puppets, Templar monks and other creatures of the night make their way to the River Duero and the Mount of Souls. 

Another tradition in the area is the Samhain of Numancia , which recovers original Celtic rites; Rompe, Rompe de las Cadenas (Break, Break the Chains), which visits the cemeteries of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures of Ágreda; and the production of Bécquer’s play El Monte de las Ánimas.