In parts of Spain and Latin America, Holy Week processions organised by lay religious brotherhoods, cofradias, have grown into major public spectacles and significant tourism draws in their own right, most famously in Seville, where dozens of brotherhoods parade elaborately dressed pasos, large sculptural floats bearing images of Christ and Mary, through the city streets over several days and nights, accompanied by penitents in the distinctive pointed hoods, nazarenos, that predate and are unrelated to any other modern association those hoods have acquired, drawing crowds that make Semana Santa one of the largest annual events in the city's calendar.
These large public processions represent a specifically lay and confraternal elaboration of the stational Jerusalem liturgy this entry's first article traces, organised and funded by centuries-old lay brotherhoods rather than directly by the institutional church hierarchy, and comparable large-scale Holy Week processions, often modelled at some historical remove on the Spanish pattern through colonial-era transmission, are kept in cities across Latin America and the Philippines, so that in these places Holy Week is experienced primarily as a large, highly organised public street event rather than as a set of services attended mainly inside church buildings.