LAS FALLAS IN SPAIN

Does the smell of gunpowder excite you? Does the sight of flames make you smile? Do you secretly harbor pyrotechnic urges that are only socially acceptable on the Fourth of July? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Las Fallas of Valencia is your kind of event--a loud, smoky, high-spirited fiesta where the whole town is literally set ablaze! So, now let’s move to another festival in Spain which is Las Fallas.

Las Fallas Spanish festival in Valencia. taken from: teachandtravelspain.com

             Every March Valencia gets ready to welcome the spring. The streets fill up with joy and the hustle and bustle of the Fallas festival, the upmost expression of the merger of tradition, satire, art and sentimentality for one's homeland. The Valencian people live their most international fiesta to the maximum and their kind and natural character invites you to visit the city and join in this fiesta, where everything that is bad is burnt and reborn from the ashes to welcome a new season

            If you decide to go to the Fallas festival prepare for an early start. Each day begins with a startling wake-up call called ‘La Despertà’ at the ridiculous time (in Spain) of 8am. You’ll just love being woken by brass bands marching down the streets accompanied by those preposterously loud firecrackers; which themselves activate car and shop alarms – just to make sure you’re ready for a day’s fun.

All day, you’ll see processions and hear explosions and then at 2pm ‘La Mascletà’ begins when there are organised pyrotechnical explosions all over the city, especially in the city’s main square, the Plaza Ayuntamiento. At first you’ll think they’re earth-shattering but they’re just an appetizer for what will come later.

On each night there is a firework display in the old river bed and they escalate in degrees of spectacle until the final night, 19th March, the Night of Fire – ‘La Nit de Foc’. This is the famous event when the enormous creations are destroyed. Neighbourhoods will have their own ‘falla infantile’ for the children at about 10pm and then, at around midnight, the neighbourhood ‘fallas’ will begin. The final, grandest fire, in the Plaza Ayuntamiento, won’t get under way until 1am at the earliest with huge crowds waiting in eager anticipation of the burning. The ‘ninots’ will all have been stuffed full with fireworks, the street lights switched off and the firemen will be in position when the 20 to 30 foot models, which took months of painstaking construction, will be razed to the ground. Each year, one ‘ninot’ is spared the ordeal – as a result of a public vote: the rest suffer a spectacular fate. 'Ninots' in ValenciaTypical 'Fallas' in Valencia.

Like many Spanish festivals, Las Fallas was, in its origin, a simple pagan ritual that celebrated the Spring Equinox and the subsequent coming of summer. Taken from: www.eyeonspain.com