Monica was walking down the street when she saw a car pulling a trailer with a giant black cross. Five men in black suits carrying a tiny coffin. Bad Bunny screaming through the speakers. This, it turns out, is El Entierro de la Sardina — the Burial of the Sardine, one of Spain’s most surreal Carnival traditions. This week’s BlanBla email explains why you can study Spanish vocabulary for years and still not understand what’s happening around you — and what the solution is.
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The Original Email
I was walking down the street today and I saw something strange.
A car. With a trailer.
And on the trailer… a big black cross.
Okay. Es raro. ¿Ku Klux Klan? No hombre. Something else.
Then I hear music. Loud.
Reggaeton. Bad Bunny screaming through the speakers:
“Es una loca. Me manda vídeos al Snap mientras se toca…”
Now I’m confused.
Behind the car, five men in old black suits. Very serious faces.
One of them holding a tiny coffin. ¿Un ataúd pequeñito?
I’m thinking: what is happening???
And then I understand.
It’s the “Burial of the Sardine.” Carnival tradition.
A fake funeral. Music. Satire. Drama. Community.
And suddenly everything makes sense.
But here’s the thing…
You can study Spanish. But you don’t get the joke.
You don’t get the wordplay.
You don’t get the cultural references.
You just see a weird parade.
When you understand the language, you understand the culture.
You laugh with the people, not at them.
Spanish is not just grammar.
It’s Carnival. It’s irony. It’s reggaeton at full volume.
It’s shouting in the street and laughing together.
That’s why I wrote this book.
So you don’t just “learn Spanish.” You join the tribe.
You understand the jokes. The traditions. The chaos. The soul.
Because language is not vocabulary. It’s belonging.
Sancho: Señor… no son gigantes. Son molinos.
Don Quijote: No sabes de aventuras, Sancho. Son gigantes.
Sancho: Espera que le pregunto a ChatGPT. En la app está 96% seguro.
Mañana más. Besos y amor, Mónica.
El Entierro de la Sardina — What Is It?
El Entierro de la Sardina (The Burial of the Sardine) is a Spanish Carnival tradition that marks the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent. A symbolic “sardine” (sometimes a papier-mâché figure) is buried or burned with mock funeral rites — tears, eulogies, music — satirising death, winter, and anything the community wants to mock. It’s darkly funny, deliberately absurd, and completely Spanish.
Key Vocabulary
Un ataúd — A coffin. Also: un ataúd pequeñito = a tiny little coffin. The diminutive -ito makes even morbid things somehow endearing.
Es raro — It’s strange/odd. Raro/a = strange, unusual. One of the most useful Spanish adjectives. ¡Qué raro! = How strange!
Reírse con la gente, no de la gente — Laughing with people, not at them. A key cultural distinction. Cultural fluency means understanding when something is absurd-funny vs. offensive.
Molinos de viento — Windmills. The Don Quijote reference: Sancho says they’re windmills, Don Quijote insists they’re giants. The eternal conflict between pragmatism and imagination — and a Spanish cultural touchstone everyone references.
Language Is Belonging
The moment you understand a cultural joke — really understand it, not because someone explained it to you but because you got it — is the moment you stop being a tourist in the language. That’s what La Tribu aims for: not vocabulary, but belonging.
Join La Tribu — or start with the free Spanish book.
— Monica Bernabe Perez