La Biznaga

The biznaga, bud by bud

The biznaga is a ball of jasmine flowers and, with the cenachero and the boquerón, one of the symbols of Málaga. Its skeleton is the dried flower head of the nerdo (Ammi visnaga), a wild umbellifer gathered green months before summer, stripped of its leaves and dried until it is hard and beige.

The jasmine is picked on summer afternoons while the buds are still closed and pushed one by one onto the tips of the skeleton. As night falls the buds open and give the biznaga its shape and scent. The biznaguero sells them stuck on a prickly-pear pad (a penca de chumbera) with its spines removed. In the Pedro Luis Alonso gardens, by the City Hall, he has a bronze monument by Jaime Fernández Pimentel.

How to play

The nerdo spins. Each tap throws a jasmine bud up at it; if it touches another one it falls, and the night is over. When a biznaga is finished its buds open, it goes onto the penca and the next one arrives, sometimes faster, sometimes turning back. Every fifth one is a Biznaga de Oro, like the Málaga Film Festival’s award. Hit a tiger mosquito and you swat it: they say a biznaga keeps mosquitoes away.

Each game is a summer evening that starts at 20:51, with four biznagas at each stop: the Pedro Luis Alonso gardens below the Alcazaba, the Paseo del Parque, Calle Larios under its summer awnings, the one-towered Cathedral, Plaza de la Merced where Picasso was born, Muelle Uno with La Farola (since 1817 the only lighthouse in mainland Spain with a feminine name) and La Malagueta, where the fireworks start at midnight.

The daily ranking

Everyone gets the same biznagas each day, so the ranking is fair. Pick a nickname to appear on the board (the same one as in Termina La Manquita and Caminito del Rey); you need no account. Every game is replayed on our server, so only real jasmine counts.

What the game stores is explained in the privacy policy.

More Málaga games: your best of the week here also counts in their shared weekly ranking.