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Festivals - Las Fallas "Fire Festival" in Valencia

Las Fallas in Spain: Valencia's Spring Break Fire Festival

by Andre Nakazawa
Although it is known for its hardy paella and milky tiger-nut drink, horchata, once a year, for five crazy nights, pyromaniacs and fiesta-lovers from all over the world descend on the...

Las Fallas

by Andre Nakazawa

Although it is known for its hardy paella and milky tiger-nut drink, horchata, once a year, for five crazy nights, pyromaniacs and fiesta-lovers from all over the world descend on the Mediterranean city of Valencia, to celebrate Las Fallas, ‘The Fires’. It is here you can indulge in the catharsis of burning the objects you’ve always wanted to burn, exploding the toys you’ve always wanted to explode, and gorging on the paella you’ve always wanted to gorge yourself on. A weekend at the country club it’s not.

With fuzzy origins, the festival has morphed into an artistic pyromaniac festival from its early days when Valencianos burned their winter’s worth of unwanted junk. Fireworks can be purchased everywhere with seemingly no regard for bourgeois concerns like safety. Countless times, kids no older than four trotted past me hurling firecrackers in every which direction, parents in tow, hurling as well. The town literally becomes a war zone during the week, as agua-de-Valencia-influenced teenagers launch their arsenals into unsuspecting crowds. It isn’t unusual to see two opposing masses of people firing the equivalent of roman candles at each other.

Every day at 2 p.m., la Mascleta, a blistering barrage of firecrackers, goes off in the Plaça de l'Ajuntament. It comes as close as anything to bloodying your eardrums and leaves the entire plaza and its surroundings lost in massive clouds of smoke and the scent of fresh gunpowder.

The festival builds to a climax on El Día de San José (St. Joseph’s Day), known as La Crema, on March 19th, the last day of the festival and the most incendiary night of them all. After a year of painstaking construction, the impressive ninots (puppets) are finally allowed to fulfill their incandescent destinies. In the weeks leading up to La Crema, each neighborhood in Valencia solemnly parades their ninots around and then proceeds to anchor them, each on its own beautiful, but highly explosive, cardboard and papier-mâché base. The ninot and his (or her) incendiary pedestal are known as a falla.

This drawn out process is more for the cultural enrichment of the Valencianos but what the tourists really come to see is the FIRE, FIRE (as stated so eloquently by Beavis and Butthead). And they won’t be disappointed. After days of paella grubbing, horchata guzzling, and firework dodging, La Crema is the perfect fiery end to a very fiery festival.

The first fallas are lit around 10:30 p.m., and it’s sadly impossible to catch the burning of all the 350-something ninots scattered throughout the city. You can still enjoy the whistling sounds of distant burnings as you make your way back to the Plaça de l'Ajuntament, this time to witness the burning of the central falla (this year we can blame globalization for the cameo of Disney character Aladdin) and to watch the firework finale at midnight that comes close to putting 4th of July in the US to shame.

When man discovered fire, what primordial homo sapien could have guessed that the discovery would evolve into the madness that is Las Fallas? A vivacious celebration of spring, life, fun and fire, Las Fallas is perhaps one of the wildest festivals in the entire world. As so aptly toasted by a friend at the end of La Crema, “Cheers to Prometheus!” Yes, cheers to you, Prometheus. Cheers to Las Fallas.