You don’t have to have everything or spend a lot to make it a magical night. Ours was and it was with few people. It was all very simple and straightforward”, explains Magui, 31 years old. She and her partner, Marc, 37, got married in September, after about six months of planning.
“Beyond the budget, we were clear that we wanted it to be a ‘very us’ wedding. This means neither with a lot of luxury nor with a lot of people. We wanted something very intimate,” she says.
They rented a farmhouse to hold the celebration and hired a DJ, a caterer of Argentinian roasts and two people to take care of the drinks. A few days before the wedding, they bought all the food and drink from a wholesaler and asked some of their guests to store it in their refrigerators. Her sister-in-law, who is a chef, did the pica-pica and acted as wedding planner. Her mother and sister accompanied her to buy the flowers.
Magui didn’t buy a wedding dress. Her mother and a dressmaker gave new life to one that her sister had already used. Her mother made the cakes and her sister did her hair, with the help of a YouTube tutorial. She did her own makeup. “We prepared everything ourselves. The day before, both families were cutting sausages”, he explains.
Raquel (28) and Eric (30) also got married in September. “We didn’t want to go into debt to celebrate our wedding. We believe that this is something that is becoming more and more aware”, she tells La Vanguardia and adds: “I think that the option of an intimate wedding is a concept that will become more and more common”.
They had a two-day wedding in a farmhouse. They bought the drinks and food, and their family and friends helped them with the rest. “We played electricians, cooks, florists… we set up all the stages, with tables and chairs. My mother made both of my wedding dresses. The wedding arch was homemade. A friend picked me up and another took care of the photos,” explains Raquel. She took care of her makeup and prepared her bouquet with olive trees from her home.
A TikTok, the label
The wedding planner and professor at the Escola Internacional de Protocol Gemma González says: “Although most of the couples we accompany prefer the traditional format, some prefer to run away from it. They have been to many weddings of relatives and friends and in the end they want original moments, something that no one has done before”.
Raquel and Eric explain in several videos on TikTok – one has more than a million views – how they set up the event in just three months. In one, with more than 300,000 reproductions, they explain that approximately 10,080 euros were spent, which would be around 150 euros for each of the 70 guests.
“Couples increasingly prefer to invite fewer people for commitment and this has meant that the number of guests is reduced, but that more is invested in each one”, says González.
According to the latest edition of the Essential Wedding Book published by Bodas.net, the average number of guests at a wedding in Spain is 117 and the average price for each is 180 euros. In 2019, more people were invited and less was spent: the average was 130 and around 158 euros for each.
“With 117 guests on average, we can’t talk about intimate weddings, but rather smaller and more exclusive”, indicates Cristina González, and clarifies that intimate weddings are “a stable thing that is not growing, and that represents 12% of weddings held in Spain”, according to a Bodas.net survey of Spanish couples who got married in 2022 and organized their wedding through the app.
According to this survey, 8% of couples had an intimate wedding with between 26 and 50 guests and less than 4% a micro wedding, with 25 or fewer guests. The wedding planner Gemma Gonzalez observes that, although most of her clients prefer weddings with many guests “every year there are some couples who decide to celebrate in privacy”, either because they do not want to have a standard wedding, for reasons economic, to extend the celebration or “because they don’t like the limelight and are more comfortable with this format”.
Although experts in the sector observe a tendency to escape from the most traditional, weddings performed by the same couple still seem to be an exception. “The Bodas.net data show that these are specific cases and that it depends a lot on the type of service. For example, only 3% of couples celebrate their wedding on their own estate or that of a relative and almost all of them celebrate it in specialized estates. In the case of clothes, only 1% of brides and 2% of grooms use a dress they already had”, explains Gonzalez. The average couple hires up to 10 suppliers.
However, he clarifies that “19% accept to receive advice and even prefer certain services, such as the wedding car (37%), to be that of a family member or friend, and to make the invitations themselves (35% )”. At Bodas.net they recommend “cutting into extras or guests before doing it yourself. Even if it seems like a very romantic project, if you don’t have full-time availability it can cause wear and tear on the couple and generate stress and responsibility for the guests.”
“Everyone told me that we were unconscious of doing everything ourselves, but today we are happy to have done it this way. It felt very much ours”, says Magui. “We experienced it as something very special. Our motto was ‘Nothing can go wrong, we will do it as well as we can and know how, and we will be happy with the result'”, says Raquel, and concludes: “Everything turned out better than we expected”.
