Fallas hot up: Valencia’s favourite regional festival ignites

IF YOU’RE in one of the three provinces of mainland Spain’s eastern region at the moment, you’ll probably need earplugs – and a very good camera. Famous the world over, as much as Sevilla’s Feria de Abril, the Semana Santa parades at Easter, and the Carnival in the Canary Islands, Valencia’s Fallas festival is a time of year when things get loud, colourful and musical.

And although Valencia city is a Mecca for Fallas fans, it doesn’t matter if you’re a few hundred kilometres away – practically every town in the provinces of Valencia and Castellón, and a small handful in the north of that of Alicante, have their own Fallas fiestas, too.

 

Where the Fallas started

Like most of Spain’s fiestas, the Fallas (pronounced like ‘fires’) isn’t a tradition that dates back centuries. Most towns have only been celebrating them in the last 50 to 100 years. It’s a pagan festival on the whole, differing from many Spanish fiestas which are loosely connected to biblical events or held in honour of saints.

The only real Christian link to the Fallas is the fact it is celebrated in the run-up to Saint Joseph’s Day (Día de San José, or Dia de Sant Josep in valenciano, the regional tongue), which is March 19, Father’s Day in Spain. Joseph was a carpenter, and over ‘his’ day, Spaniards would traditionally burn their old and broken wooden furniture in street fires – a symbolic ‘out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new’ to mark the end of winter and the start of spring, the first day of which is on March 21.

But the Fallas as we know them today involves huge, literally house-sized, brightly-coloured papier mâché statues built on wooden frames which are burnt down on the night of March 19 – and the three-storey bonfires are not the main focus of the fiesta, the statues themselves are in the days they fill every street corner.

 

What you’ll see on the streets

In towns which celebrate the fiesta, every neighbourhood has its own falla – that’s with a lower-case ‘f’; the festival itself is written with a capital ‘F’ – or giant monument, which specialist falla artists spend nearly the whole year building. Although it always seems a travesty to burn them down at the end of the fiestas, doing so means the artists get to stay in a job for another year, so it’s socially responsible, however tragic it feels at the time.

The falla statues satirise current affairs and poke fun at famous figures – royalty, celebrities, politicians…nobody is exempt, and in practice, nobody wants to be, because if you’re in that level of public position, it feels more of an affront not to feature on a falla than to have the mickey taken out of you in front of tourists – and a smaller, children’s version, normally based upon a fun, fairytale scene or something cute and fantasy-like accompanies the main falla. Each statue is named after its neighbourhood, and each one has its own commission, or ‘club’, named after the falla, and all the commissions come under the wider umbrella of the whole town’s Junta Local Fallera which, in some cases, has its own, separate falla representing the municipality.

Every falla has a marquée next to it, known as a Casal, and commission members spend the best part of a week in it, eating all their meals there and partying almost every night to live music or DJs.

 

Costume makes the queen

Girls and women in each commission spend the entire fiesta wearing traditional Valencian costume – short-sleeved, low-cut dresses with huge skirts, floor-length and set around wide crinolines, made of expensive damask and embroidered, and with their hair braided into three rolls, one on either side and one at the back of their heads, in the shape of coffee-coasters. These are held in place with solid-gold or solid-silver clips and combs; the headwear alone costs several hundred euros, and the dresses can be upwards of €3,000, so becoming a fallera, as these ladies are known, is not a cheap hobby. The boys’ and mens’ costumes, of shirts and knickerbockers, are less pricey, but not as showy or as brightly-coloured – it’s the falleras, not the falleros (the male versions) who turn heads when they fill the streets with psychedelic tones during parades.

Every Casal has a Fallera de Casal, elected annually, whose job it is to provide all the food for breakfasts – hot chocolate, cakes, and so on – making it a responsible and costly role, but a huge honour. Another elected position is that of Fallera del Foc, the one who sets the falla on fire on March 19, and the biggest and most prestigious job of all is that of Fallera Mayor, the fiesta queen; each falla has one, and the town as a whole has one to represent them all, and the kudos is equivalent to that of being elected Carnival Queen, Miss España or Spain’s Eurovision representative – especially if you’re chosen as Fallera Mayor of Valencia city, meaning your name is practically guaranteed to go down in history.

These three roles can only be held once in a lifetime, and the main fallas and children’s fallas each have them; the remaining falleras are referred to as the Cort d’Honor, or entourage, which you can form part of again and again, year after year, and in the same costume as long as it still fits you.

 

What happens

Informal parades in costume – normally with one falla group visiting another Casal and collecting its members before heading onto the next and doing likewise, then rinse and repeat throughout the town – as well as the mass and solemn march in honour of San José on March 19, a satirical costumed parade with prizes, and the formal prizegiving for each of the falla monuments are some of the lower-key events that happen throughout Fallas week, starting with the plantà (‘planting’), when the fallas are first set up, on March 16, and the nightly discos and parties in the Casales.

Throughout the fiestas from the plantà onwards, every day at 14.00 in Valencia’s city hall square and in most other towns that celebrate the festivals, a mascletà takes place – dozens, or even hundreds, of gunpowder bangers are tied together on strings above head-height, known as tracas, and after the first is lit, the rest go up in sequence, sending up clouds of smoke (sometimes coloured smoke) and creating a deafening explosion that goes on for several minutes. The aim is purely to make as much noise as possible, and it rarely fails to be met.

Normally on March 18, although sometimes on March 17, one of the most treasured events of the fiesta takes place – the offering of flowers to the Virgin Mary, known as the Ofrenda or, in valenciano, as the Ofrena. A highly-emotional pageant and a celebration of women in general, it sees long parades of falleras fitting bouquets into a gigantic wooden frame with the head of the Virgin until the flowers form her skirt and the rest of her body, and each floral gift usually carries a tag dedicated to the women in the fallera’s life, living or departed, as a tribute to them. Naturally, tears flow, and most falleras say they consider the Ofrenda to be another International Women’s Day for them – with all the same level of girl power, but in a much more sentimental and peaceful demonstration of it.

 

Let’s get loud

Your falla coming first in the prizegiving is always a reason for cheering, but it also means you’ll get to keep it intact for longer. On the night of the cremà (‘burning’), on March 19, the bottom-placed fallas are the first to go up in flames, and the winner is the final one of the night to bite the dust.

Before the Fallera del Foc lights the traca wrapped around the monument and which starts the blaze after the repeated, deafening explosions, the Fallera Mayor gets to choose a figurine, known as a ninot, from the falla. This ninot will be saved from burning, and is known as a ninot indultat (‘reprieved figurine’) and normally goes on to form part of ever-expanding local Fallas exhibitions out of season or, in the case of Valencia and the large town of Gandia 70 kilometres south of it, becomes a display item in their local Falla museums.

Firefighters are always stationed next to the fallas to hose the immediate area – and any nearby buildings – and the cremà of every monument has to wait until the fire engine and the ambulance are in place.

Most towns aim to get their cremà over by around 01.30, although sometimes it is still happening at around 05.00 – meaning that, although March 19 is a bank holiday in the Valencia region, most falleras and falleros rather wish March 20 was instead, so they can spend the day asleep. In practice, given that they rarely catch more than about four hours’ sleep a night during the fiestas, with parties going on until around 03.00 or 04.00 and the ‘grand awakening’ each morning being at around 07.00, most falla members book March 20 off as annual leave and take a long lie-in.

 

Valencia’s the Falla Mecca, but the rest of the region does it splendidly

Valencia city during Fallas is, arguably, the place to be – its fallas are bigger, more colourful, more detailed, more topical and provocative, and funnier, than anywhere else in the region – but hotel rooms over those few days suddenly shoot up in price, and of course, the streets are extremely crowded. You can find hotel accommodation in smaller towns throughout the provinces and enjoy the more close-knit, homely versions for much less money, and then catch buses or trains to Valencia itself. From Gandia, Xàtiva and other towns within approximately an hour’s drive (don’t take the car; most of the streets are closed), trains are now running 24 hours a day until March 20, meaning you can pop to Valencia and hang around there most of the night before returning to where you’re staying and enjoying even more fiesta action right outside your accommodation.

But travelling to Valencia is not compulsory; you’ve still ‘done’ the Fallas even if you’re in another town in the region that celebrates them, and if it’s your first time, you’ll still find your mind (and ear-drums) blown.