The night of 5 January is, without a doubt, the most magical of the year. The Reis, or Three Kings of the Orient, make their triumphant entry into the villages, towns and cities. Sometimes, they arrive by land, on all kinds of vehicles, or riding various different animals. In some places they arrive by air: helicopters, light aircraft, or hot air balloons. And, finally, they can arrive by sea: old boats or luxury vessels, fishing boats and launches bring them to port. When they have been welcomed by everyone, with the appropriate solemnity, they begin the job of visiting the houses one by one, to take presents to all the people. If they have been good, that is. If not, the Kings leave them coal.

Keeping  a careful and comprehensive record of our wrongdoings to assess whether or not we deserve gifts is a difficult job. A task beyond the capacity of even Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar, who already have enough headaches.They need assistants who, not to mince words, do the job for them: these are the pages, the royal postman, the helpers, and the spies who spend all year watching what we do and do not do.

There is an abundance of pages, royal postmen, helpers and spies in this long list of workers. There are some members of this technical staff who have come to have quite a reputation and people know them by name. It is not unusual, coming back as they do to the same place year after year, that they become very well known. In Barcelona, for example, the page Amadeu and the helper Gregori (who has a long, thick  moustache) are in charge of organising and coordinating the Three Kings' intelligence service. Relatively recently, the Barcelona team incorporated a female page, Estel, the first woman we have ever seen in the support team for the arrival of the Three Kings. But there are many others. Whoever our page, postman or spy is, we hope that the Three Kings will bring us a lot of presents, and if they bring us a little bit of coal, we will not worry about it: next year we will behave better.