March 17th, 2006

Las Fallas

By Anne-Marie Dingemans

One of the best known festivals in Spain, after the Fiestas de Abril in Seville and the Fiestas de San Fermin in Pamplona (running with the bulls), are the Fallas of Valencia. Fallas are gigantic creations of paper mache, wood and wax, and are build by neighborhood groups, taking months, often close to a year, to complete. The Fallas depict current events and political figures, often in a satirical way. There are more than 300 of them, all proudly displayed in the streets starting March 15th. They are beautiful to see, and every Fallera celebrates pretty much around the clock with open bars and music in the streets and everyone is welcome to join. A good Falla-celebrator will go round the city (on foot, hopefully) to visit the various fallas and have a drink at each of them. With hundreds of Fallas, this can take a while, depending on your stamina and tolerance for alchohol!

Las Fallas is essentially a celebration of fire; firecrackers (the noisy kind, not the beautiful displays of fireworks) are lit 24/7 from March 13th-19th, and on the night of March 19th, the day of St. Joseph, homage is paid to this Saint by lighting all Fallas on fire! At midnight, the work of months, hundreds of people and millions of Euros (a Falla can cost up to 300,000 Euros – and there are 300 of them) go up in flames, surrounded by a deafening display of fire crackers – spectacular!

As you can imagine, many tourists from Spain and all over the world come to Valencia to celebrate with the Valencians. About as many Valencianos, however, actually escape the city during Las Fallas. If you're not a Fallera yourself, it's actually not a lot of fun to not be able to sleep because of the firecrackers (you won't believe it unless you experience it, but seriously, I'm talking actual 24/7 and trembling windows here) and to have half the city blocked off. So far I've tried to avoid all of it but I may pop out on Saturday night to see the Fallas as they are so beautiful and funny. Then I'll also have my yearly treat of porras (you can also have churros or bunuelos, but I prefer the porra); thumb-thick sticks of deep-friend dough with sugar . Yummy and makes it almost worth the suffering!