Fire!

3/17 - 3/20

Fallas is probably the pyromaniac's dream festival. Hundreds of huge paper, wax, wood and polystyrene constructions are built up around the city. Every day a ridiculous number of fireworks and firecrackers are let off and on the last night everything gets exploded and burned. A 5-storey polystyrene sculpture going up in a tower of fire is something everyone should be able to see at least once.

Finding accommodation in Valencia for Fallas proved to be even more difficult than in Venice for the Carnevale. The best we could do in the end was a hotel in the nearby beach town, Cullera. To get there from Terrassa we travelled by light rail, metro, bus, metro, train and foot to finally arrive late on Saturday, then headed straight back into Valencia by bus and rail to sample the sights.

Fallas is both the name of the festival and of the constructions themselves. There are two kinds: the small fallas infantil and the huge fallas usually built with satirical political or topical themes in mind. Most of the satire went above our heads but a few that didn't require any local knowledge or language stood out: the 'orient' invading the market, old pervs both pretending to be young on line, the fallas themselves becoming outrageously fancy and increasingly expensive structures from their humble beginnings.
They were all so impressive that I have no choice but to post (almost) every single picture I took of them right here.

The fallas ridiculing fallas.

Don't know what's going on here.

John Lennon sitting on the king.

'The Orient' invading the marketplace.

The rallying cry for the original, liberal constitution of 1812.

Something political.

While proclaiming 'Liberte' and 'Fraternite', on the back of the donkey is...

...a monk(?) wielding a noose.

Tetris. Incongruous.

Some clowns. Surely political.

A nice play with perspective.

The screen shows a cute boy she's messaging. The other side of the display features a really ugly old guy and on his screen is a cute girl.

Arabian nights theme.

Er?

Great expression on the queen's face.

Some sort of commentary on romance.

Probably our favourite fallas, in part because we had fun trying to recognise all the fables and fairytales it features. How many can you spot?

 

There was also something going on with parades and flowers to pile up on a wooden 'Maria', but we didn't pay much attention with all the fireworks and burning going on.

Everyone brings a bouquet.

And they all get added to this frame over two days.

One of the biggest draws of the festival is the daily 'mascleta'. This is what you get when you detonate hundreds of kilograms of fireworks all at once in order to deafen everyone in a wide radius. It stays above 100 decibels for a full five minutes, peaking at around 120 decibels for the finale. That's four times as loud as 100db and just below the threshold of pain and bleeding ears, like standing a metre away from an amp tower at a rock concert. It takes place every day in the town square but we couldn't get any closer than three blocks away because of the crush, but it was still pretty damn loud.

The 'crema' is, of course, the climax and the raison d'etre for the fallas. I probably shouldn't use three languages in a sentence like that but if the English language can't provide better alternatives what can I do? Anyway. Fire!

At first we thought it was pretty crazy setting off such big fireworks in narrow streets, but that was before they started burning stuff.

When this fallas infantil started burning we were only two metres away. When all the fireworks in it exploded we were suddenly four metres away as the crowd lurched backward.

The first of the two fallas we saw burn.

Moments later.

By this point the whole crowd had backed off at least two meters from the barricades and hot sparks and embers were flying all over the place.

Our favourite fallas was next to burn. The firefighters seemed a bit nervous about this one.

Seconds later, before the fireworks had even finished, this towering column of fire consumed everything.

Almost before we knew it, it was all over...

...we were covered in soot and heading home.