La Passió d'Esparreguera

The Esparreguera Passion Play (Catalan: Passió d'Esparreguera) is a performance of the Passion Play in Esparreguera, Catalonia, Spain. The play has over three hundred actors and live music, and is performed in twelve performances, staged every Sunday from March to May.

The townspeople of Esparreguera, a town northwest of Barcelona, get involved every year to carry out the festival. The performances take place at the Teatre de la Passió, a large theater venue opened in 1969 and designed specifically for Passion Play performances. Along with the Olesa Passion (; ), it is one of the most important Passion Plays in Catalonia.

The Counter-Reformation, initiated by the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) in response to the Protestant Reformation, resulted in widespread performances of the sacred drama, performed on the street by unions, guilds and rural communities. Starting in the seventeenth century, numerous different texts proliferated, with all versions more or less following the traditional line. Ecclesiastical authorities managed to bring them together into a more cleaned-up and unified version, in a text attributed to Fray Antoni de San Jerónimo, published in Vic in 1773. In reality the vic script essentially compiled all of the different versions extant at the time. This version was performed in Esparreguera until the 1940s.

The earliest performances of the Esparreguera Passion Play took place in the early seventeenth century (1611), and were performed outside in the streets as the natural setting in which to represent the events of Christ's Passion. These street performances continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they moved indoors and the performances were put on in a variety of public or private venues, and the whole production was redesigned as a classical theatrical play in two parts, with the first part, performed in the morning, depicting the three years of Jesus' public life, and the second part, in the afternoon, showing his passion, death and resurrection.

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