Let it BURN!!! Venga ya!

Explosions, fire, drinking, eating, and more explosions. That's pretty much the short story version of my weekend.

Here's the long story:
Me and E spent the last 4-5 days in chaos. Thursday night we started packing and mentally prepping for our fun filled weekend. We were headed to Valencia (about a 5 hour bus ride) the next morning for the Las Fallas festival. After much anticipation, we were finally there, in Valencia!

We finally arrived to our hostel hours later than planned (we got hungry) and with only a little bit of confusion. I had, of course, forgotten all the paperwork (bus tickets, hostel addresses and directions, etc) at E's house so it also took a bit longer to figure everything out from the get go...

At lunch

yum...sangria orange

                                                              

That night we rested, why? Because we had a FULL weekend ahead of us. That and walking in the neighborhood to get some food we had gotten our first taste of Las Fallas- which was loud fireworks every which way we went. Literally EVERYWHERE. And we knew there was much more to come. So, for the time being, we rested.

All of Friday night we spend looking at all the activities for the weekend and figuring out what we wanted to see. So when Saturday morning rolled around we were ready...kind of. We headed into town (late) and had an "appointment" for a wine tasting. Unfortunately, being accustomed to Spanish time and all, we were a bit late and we "missed" our session. BUT they were actually quite nice and gave us 2 big glasses of 'expensive' (a whole 10euro) and some snacks. Just what we needed at noon (mind you we had just woken up around 10am). The wine tasting was great and E even got to spill her drink all over the table...a TRUE wine tasting experience.

 From there we wondered around admiring all the HUGE effigies around town. I mean these things are 30feet tall and more! Groups of people spend all year making these and they are stunning. I'll post some pics on this post but check out my album for more: Valencia

 If you want to learn more about the Las Fallas you can check it out on Wikipedia- Falles. Here's the Wiki part about the actual history of the event:

The Falles (Valencian: [ˈfaʎes], sing. Falla; Spanish: Fallas) is a traditional celebration held in commemoration of Saint Joseph in Valencia, Spain. The term Falles refers to both the celebration and the monuments created during the celebration. A number of towns in the Valencian Community have similar celebrations inspired by the original in Valencia.

Each neighbourhood of the city has an organized group of people, the Casal faller, that works all year long holding fundraising parties and dinners, usually featuring the famous specialty paella. Each casal faller produces a construction known as a falla which is eventually burnt. A casal faller is also known as a comissió fallera.

The name of the festival is thus the plural of the Valencian word falla. The word's derivation is as follows:

    Latin fax "torch" → Latin facvla (diminutive) → Vulgar Latin *facla → Valencian falla.

History...

There are different speculations regarding the origin of the Falles festival. One suggests that the Falles started in the Middle Ages, when artisans disposed of the broken artifacts and pieces of wood they saved during the winter by burning them to celebrate the spring equinox. Valencian carpenters used planks of wood called parots to hang their candles on during the winter, as these were needed to provide light for the carpenters to work by. With the coming of the spring, they were no longer necessary, so they were burned. Over time, and with the intervention of the Church, the date of the burning of these parots was made to coincide with the celebration of the festival of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters.

This tradition continued to evolve. The parot was dressed with clothing so that it looked like a person; features identifiable with some well-known person from the neighbourhood were often added as well. To collect these materials, children went from house to house asking for una estoreta velleta (an old rug) to add to the parot. This became a popular song that the children sang as they gathered all sorts of old flammable furniture and utensils to burn in the bonfire with the parot. These parots were the first ninots. With time, people of the neighbourhoods organized the building of the falles and the typically intricate constructions, including their various figures, were born.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the falles were tall boxes with three or four wax dolls dressed in fabric clothing. This changed when the creators began to use cardboard. The fabrication of the falles continues to evolve in modern times, when the largest displays are made of polystyrene and soft cork easily molded with hot saws. These techniques have allowed the creation of falles over 30 metres high.

The origin of the pagan festival is similar to that of the Bonfires of Saint John celebrated in the Alicante region, in the sense that both came from the Latin habit of lighting fires to welcome spring. But in Valencia, this ancient tradition led to the burning of accumulated waste at the end of winter, particular wood, on the day of Saint Joseph, as was fitting. Given the reputed humorous character of Valencians, it was natural that they began to burn figurines depicting people and events of the past year. The burning symbolised liberation from servitude to the memory of these events or else represented humorous and often critical commentary on them. The festival thus evolved a more satirical and ironic character, and the wooden castoffs gradually came to be assembled into progressively more elaborate 'monuments' that were designed and painted in advance.

During the early 20th century and especially during the Spanish Civil War, the monuments became more anti-clerical in nature and were often highly critical of the local or national governments, which in fact tried to ban the Falles many times, without success. Under the dictatorship of Franco the celebration lost much of its satirical nature because of government censorship, but the monuments were among the few fervent public expressions allowed then, and they could be made freely in Valencia. During this period, many religious customs such as the offering of flowers to Our Lady of the Forsaken were taken up, which today are essential parts of the festival, even though unrelated to the original purpose of the celebration, and somewhat antithetical in spirit.

With the restoration of democracy and the end of government censorship, the critical falles reappeared, and obscene satirical ones with them. Despite thirty years of freedom of expression, the world view of the fallero can still be socially conservative, is often sexist and may involve some of the amoralism of Valencian politics. This has sometimes led to criticism by certain cultural critics, environmentalists, and progressives. Yet there are celebrants of all ideologies and factions, and they have different interpretations of the spirit of the celebration. In fact, recent initiatives such as the pilota championships, literary competitions and other events show a culturally vibrant city that yet relies on its ancient traditions to express its singular identity, even those as seemingly frivolous as the Falles festival.

Here are some pics of the effigies we saw:

 

That afternoon and evening there was a never ending parade. Seriously. These people just walked around for HOURS. It was really fun to watch however. All the people in the parade were dressed in traditional wear, making them all look like royalty.

We walked around with the the parade and worked our way through the crowds (which felt like moving through a packed crowd at a concert) and just enjoyed Valencia and all its chaos. We also stumbled upon some fair-like stands of goods being sold and of course we found many things that caught our eye. 

At that point we had been walking around all day so we started to make our way home. We had endured enough fireworks and parades for one day.

Sunday we had to move ourselves to a different hostel (we had to different places booked), so we got up and got moving. Dropped our belonging off at the new place and we were off again. This time we first got into town and headed straight to lunch. The whole weekend we were determined to be on a paella only diet (Valencia is very famous for theirs) so we continued with that. This time we came upon a small restaurant on a side street, it looked cute and we were hungry so it was a match. We were daring and ordered the black rice (black because they put squid ink in it) and MAN was it good! We ate up the whole pan and were left with the itis afterwards (itis, if you don't know, means food coma). So to solve that problem we walked around for a bit then stopped in a bakery and sat down and tried some Valencian pastries...sounds logically, no? Luckily we were smart and also ordered coffee to perk us right up.

We spent the next few hours, once again, walking around but this time we added drinking horchata and shopping into the mix.

 Then we started to crash so we headed back for a nap...why? Because the day wasn't even close to over! We had to be back out to watch the huge firework show at 1am. And it was SPECTACULAR. The whole show lasted over 20min which i found amazing and the streets were just so crowded...no where else have I seen anything like it.

We eventually made it back to the hostel by about 3am...SLEEP TIME!

Monday finally came around and we were ready. It was our last day in Valencia and the last day of the festivities. We slept in as long as possible since we had to leave the hostel at 12...dropped off our bags at the bus station and we were off! Our goal for the day...stay awake!

We had already walked around so much of the city and seen so many of the effigies that we were ready to stay stationary  for a while since we were going to have to be up until 3am. So first stop, lunch. Second, coffee and pastries. We were waiting around for the real fun...fire parade and the burnings!!! Finally the fire parade started and it was so much fun to watch. It was utter chaos with the people in the parade twirling around pitchforks and spewed out fire and sparks into the crowds...yet no one caught fire. Not sure how that works. Either way, it was amazing.

The BIG event was later that evening. So we went out for drinks and some food in the meantime...then the fun started. We saw crowds starting to gather so we joined in a waited...and waited...and waited. And FINALLY, after about 30-45min later they set the first effigy on fire! And they burned it to the ground! It was great. And we got to stand about 10feet away from all this. AMAZING. So then we were off to the next burning...of course we couldn't see ALL of them so we went to a few and stood our ground while we waited for more burning to commence. And it did, over and over again.

the children's effigy

setting it on fire w/ fireworks

it burns!

fire!

its gone!

These huge structures that they've been working on all year went down in flames in less than 5 min. The sheer craziness of this festival was all worth it. 

The burnings started around 10pm and went on past 3am. We couldn't stay for the last ones because we had a bus to catch! We booked it to our bus, made it JUST in time and were back in Madrid by 8am. Voila!

And THAT was our weekend in Valencia at Las Fallas. Explosions, fire, drinking, eating, and more explosions.