Massive religious floats use hemp sacks to glide over cobblestones with surgical precision
During Holy Week in Spain, massive religious floats weighing up to five tons navigate narrow streets using hemp sacks to reduce friction and achieve incredible maneuverability on centuries-old cobblestones.
In a display of mechanical poetry, teams of up to 200 porters called costaleros carry ornate wooden platforms known as pasos. They use specialized hemp sacks to lower the friction coefficient to 0.3, nearly half that of bare wood. This allows them to glide over uneven cobblestones with a precision of just one centimeter per second.
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