This post is also available in: Spanish

On Saturday the 5th of February, Casa de Campo Living (us) hosted our second annual ChiChiGua Fest at the Casa de Campo Polo fields and it was a fly-away success! From as early as 10am on Saturday morning Casa de Campo´s residents, visitors and villa owners swept onto the polo fields with hoards of excited children and a variety of home-made kites in tow: ready to spend a fun-filled day enjoying the juegos inflables from Magicland and flying those kites up…..up…..and away! Kites and kite-flying was of course the day’s main attraction and this year we had more home-made kites (ChiChiGua’s in Spanish) than ever before, in all shapes, sizes, colors and designs! Patricia Proaño was the first to arrive with her cow kite (La Vaca!) and throughout the day more and more amazing kites flooded through the gates and blew us away with their ingenious designs! As always, some of our ‘kite creators’ (generally men) were a little over ambitious in their kite-making abilities – many with kites so large they had trouble even transporting them to the polo fields……..and then of course actually getting them to fly was well, challenging to say the least! In general, however, nearly all of the kites no matter how large or crazy the design, did at some point make it into the air – with the exception of Tato’s MEGA kite, which consisted of 3 separate sections…none of which seemed to want to fly! Sorry Tato!

Oh the drama! Trying to get Tato’s MEGA-kite to fly!

For many  (myself included) the challenge of actually creating a kite was a little much, so as well as all the stress and strife (sorry I mean fun and frolicks) of people trying to fly their intricately decorated and elaborately designed real ChiChiGuas, the sky (and the ground) also filled with a variety of colorful shop-bought kites! I tried to fly one myself and spent at least half an hour jumping up and down throwing the thing in the air, until it eventually started to fly, only to come repeatedly crashing down to earth again! Rather frustrating….all in the name of fun and games!

The Santoni Family use a little team work to get their giant kite in the air.

As well as all the kite-flying, one of the Altos de Chavón Artists in Residence Argenis Lebron joined us to run a ‘Kite-making workshop’ which was very popular, although it did quickly turn into ‘Argenis making kites and giving them to the children’ workshop – it seems the art of kite-making is more complex than I imagined! Also a popular attraction were the bouncy castles or the ‘brinca brinca’ from Magicland which kept the smaller children happy whilst the adults partook in a little kite-flying or relaxed with a burger and beer from the Casa de Campo BBQ. A really great day!
I would like to say a HUGE thank you to Calixto Garcia-Velez, the director of Polo for allowing us to use the Polo Fields – THANKS CALI!!
To end the festivities, prizes were awarded for the best ChiChiGua’s…more photos and details of our prize winners coming soon! In the meantime here are some photos for you to enjoy!
DOWNLOADING THE PHOTOS To download these photos, follow these easy steps: 1. Right click on the SMALL photo (before it has been enlarged) 2. Chose ‘Open link in new tab’ 3. Right click on the individual photo and click ‘Save photo as’ A DESCARGAR LAS FOTOS 1. Haz click derecho cuando la foto es pequeña 2. Elige la opción ’Abrir link en la nueva tabla’ o ‘Open link in new tab’ 3. Haz click derecho en la foto y elige ‘Guardar foto’ o ‘Save photo as’
This article was written by Rebecca Hughes, editor of Casa de Campo Living and Casa de Campo’s entertainment specialist! Rebecca Hughes, Editorial and Events Marketing rhughes@casadecampoliving.com TEL: 809-523-2045   CEL: 809-949-8906 (evenings and weekends) BBM: 230DA5D1 Altos de Chavón, Casa de Campo This article was produced exclusively for www.casadecampoliving.com