The paso is designed around an unusual constraint: it has to move through streets that were laid out before it existed, at night, carried by people. In Seville the bearers work underneath, inside the structure, forty or so to a float, shoulders against padded beams, unable to see where they are going. A foreman walks in front and communicates by rapping on the frame, and the team lifts, walks, halts and lowers to those signals. Corners in the old quarters are taken in a series of tiny shuffling steps. The effect from the street is that a large gilded object carrying life-sized figures glides forward with no visible means of propulsion, and that effect is the entire craft.
Malaga does it differently, with far larger tronos carried on external beams by teams running into the hundreds, and other cities use wheels or shorter routes. What is constant is the scale of the undertaking. A brotherhood may be on the street for eight or twelve hours, moving from its own church to the cathedral and back on a route fixed and timetabled by the city, threading between other brotherhoods doing the same thing. The music is a band behind the float, and in Andalusia the procession can be stopped by a saeta, a single unaccompanied voice from a balcony, at which everything halts until the singer has finished.