Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Mar 03, 2008 - 09:50 AM Festivals

The very alternative Boom Festival, Portugal (this year being held August 11th-18th), has issued a press release reminding that pets in general and dogs in particular are not allowed. The reasons run from the obvious (to everyone except a particularly obtuse kind of dog lover) - that it would be unkind to the animals to subject them to days of intensive, loud music, that they are likely to suffer dehydration and heat stroke, they are unhygienic, they are likely to stress out and fight and/or bite people - to the fact that the festival location is within a leishmaniasis zone. This was something I had only been dimly aware of before, not being a pet owner, so I checked: most of the Mediterranean, including southern Portugal and Spain, is considered a canine leishmaniasis zone (humans are not affected here, thank goodness), and it is thought that a dog has a 30-35% chance of contracting the disease. Read on for more about the Boom Festival and leishmaniasis here.

From its beginnings as a meeting point for a couple of thousand trancers back in 1997, Boom Festival has grown into one of the high spots of the alternative festival season in Europe. Its four stages offer a range of music from the vaguely eclectic to the frankly psychodelic, without passing through anything resembling commercial. On the art side, you will find interactivity, multimedia, videoart, painting and sculpture, and all of this at a tribal gathering which wants to be what hippies used to call transcendental - “Boom sees itself as amplifier and a converter of concepts and we take that responsibility dearly in every single step we plan. Within this vast “ocean” of consciousness Boom is a lighthouse of sanity, ethic responsibility and a building block for the future to come." Rock on.

Boom is held on the shores of Lake Idanha-a-Nova, in the municipality of the same name in the rural district of Castelo Branco, Beira Baixa, close to the Spanish border. Bus shuttles will run from Oporto, Lisbon and Madrid, so pick the airport you prefer.

Leishmaniasis is a nasty, mosquito-borne parasitic disease, which owners should take into consideration before taking pets to places where it is endemic. It is a protozoan parasite, and once leishmaniasis has been contracted it is impossible to cure, though it can be palliated and affected pets can enjoy a long, largely illness-free life if treated. It is endemic in many third-world countries where it is even nastier, affecting people as well as animals, but only the canine version (cats are not susceptible) is found in Southern Europe, and it is only found in the south of Europe, except for pets which have contracted the disease during their owners' holidays abroad. It affects dogs over a year old, of any breed, though German Shepherds and Doberman Pinschers are particularly liable to catch it (it would be damned unsociable to take a Doberman Pinscher to a festival, anyway, say I). Surprisingly for a disease normally found in tropical and subtropical climes, it seems to have become endemic in North America, among foxhounds above all. It comes in two varieties, cutaneous and the more frequent visceral leishmaniasis, and symptoms include "chronic weight loss, lymphadenopathy, alopecia and exfoliative dermatitis, nodular skin lesions, chronic renal failure and epistaxis" (which sounds horrible, but only means "nose-bleed").

More information:
Boom Festival
Canine Leishmaniasis