Easter in Europe

The best Holy Week celebrations are in Andalusia Spain with processions every day.

You could celebrate it twice over: Western Easter perhaps in Spain, as recommended above, and then Orthodox Pascha in Greece, Romania or Georgia a week later on 8th April. In Greece, I suggest the town of Hagios Nikolaos in Crete, where your hotel may well provide you with the decorated candle, to take to the midnight service and procession, and the sumptuous traditional feast that follows.

I was in Sicily for Easter this year. Catania has processions daily during a Holy Week and then for nearly 24 hours on Good Friday...

I have never experienced it myself unfortunately, but from what I have heard and read, the Spanish celebrations really focus more on the Holy Week than on Easter itself. So you could actually make that a three-stop - and very un-protestant :-) - tour:

• Holy Week in Spain
• "Urbi et Orbi" in Rome
• Orthodox Easter in Greece a week later

Be aware that all of those places are going to be terribly crowded with tourists and locals and ex-locals traveling home for the festivities. So you should probably pre-book early for all those destinations.

Having said all that, I personally love the experience of an Easter service just at a small church along the wayside, wherever I happen to be. Many churches will have sunrise services which are very special, IMO.

My Easter in Europe travel experiences have been limited to the Nordic Countries. Norway in particular celebrates Easter in a more secular way than the Central Europe countries. Easter Week is a very heavily traveled week and cities are depopulated with from Easter Thursday through Easter Sunday. High traffic days outbound are the weekend before Easter and the Wednesday and Thursday of Easter and the Monday after Easter being a holiday for getting back home. The repercussion for tourist is trains and air can be sold out way in advance of the Easter holiday and vacation area are fully booked with minimum stay requirement.

Yeah, make sure you understand which days are public holidays, and that may vary from country to country. In Germany for instance it's Good Friday and Easter Monday, but not Maundy Thursday. Also, there may be school vacations (in Germany, it's two weeks, with the exact dates varying by state).

This will affect your travels, not only in the sense mentioned by the previous poster but also because public transportation runs either on a special schedule or on the Sunday schedule on public holidays.

Spain is the best I know of. Holy Thursday in Zaragosa was one of the top experiences of my life. Everyone knows about Saville. Valladolid is another city famous, at least in Spain, for it's Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebrations. Seville is most likely to have tourists, Zaragosa was a very local celebration. Holy Thursday had 26 very lively processions, most with hundreds of drums in them, going from Thursday afternoon through the night. Avoid Barcelona though. Barcelona is the least religious city in the least religious region of Spain. I was there for part of Holy Week and there was nothing other than some extra masses in the cathedral. Barcelona has one procession on Good Friday but it's put on by Andalucia expats and not connected to the local church.

In March is the Las Fallas (Fire Festival) in Valencia. If I were in the area at that time of year, I'd want to attend. A few weeks after Easter Week is the April Fair in Seville, another great cultural experience. I was glad I spent Easter Week elsewhere but visited Seville for the Fair. This time of year is a pretty great time to be in Spain when most of Europe is still fairly dreary.

Last year I went to Valencia for Las Fallas, it runs from March 15-19, really different, fun, and a pretty city to boot. Then I went to Malaga and Sevilla for Semana Santa, loved the celebrations in Malaga, much less so in Sevilla. If I'd planned better, I'd have been in Granada on Easter Sunday, the have a special procession that day.