During the central feast days, Lucma sheds its sleepy cadence. The celebrations are managed through the traditional mayordomía system, a communal rotation of leadership where selected families or neighborhood committees finance and coordinate the celebrations. Costs can reach tens of thousands of soles, spent on hiring regional brass bands, feeding hundreds of guests, and manufacturing elaborate pyrotechnic towers (castillos).
Ceremonial dances anchor the visual landscape. Traditional dance troupes, including the Negritos, Gitanos, and Pallas, perform intricate choreographies through the unpaved streets surrounding the central plaza. Each dance group acts as an honor guard for the Cristo Crucificado during solemn processions. Dancers wear brightly colored silk garments, mirrors that refract the harsh Andean sunlight, and masks honoring historical cultural encounters between native highlanders, Afro-descendants, and Iberian colonizers.
The solemn procession marks the emotional apex of the festival. When the heavy wooden litter bearing the Señor de la Misericordia emerges from the parish doors, the crowd falls silent save for the somber rhythms of brass trumpets and skin drums. Bearers, organized into lifelong fraternities (hermandades), navigate steep cobblestone gradients, pausing at decorated floral carpets laid across the streets by neighborhood associations.
