Pedro Duque: Spaceship take-off is less noisy than Valencia’s ‘mascletaes’

Science minister Pedro Duque – Spain’s first man on the moon, a seasoned space traveller and national hero among kids born in the 1990s – joined the fiesta queens or falleras mayores and regional president Ximo Puig on the city hall balcony for one of the mascletaes, the last of which for this year was let off at 14.00 today (Tuesday).

His facial expression in the above photograph says it all – the ground-trembling experience and earth-shattering roar go above and beyond what Duque remembers from his days as an astronaut.

This is not the first time he has watched the spectacle from the city hall balcony, however – he did so many years ago, and has noticed how the ‘complexity’ of Valencia’s mascletaes has improved ‘considerably’, especially now computerised and electronic equipment is used.

Mascletaes normally just produce grey smoke, especially in other towns in the region which celebrate the Fallas, but the ones in Valencia include clouds of red, yellow and blue, in the colours of the Senyera, as the regional flag is known.

Duque said he found the experience ‘emotional’ and ‘exciting’, and that ‘everyone feels it’.

The midday heat during the mascletaes has been unprecedented this year – temperatures of around 20ºC during most of the day have been shooting up to around 30ºC briefly over lunchtime, meaning a number of tourists from colder countries had to be given first aid on site when they started to feel faint in the dense crowds outside the city hall.

Falla monuments across the provinces of Valencia and Castellón, and also in the towns of Pego, Dénia, Pamís and Calpe in the northern part of the Alicante province, will go up in flames tonight in a ritual burning known as the cremà, a mass destruction that ensures falla artists stay in a job, given that the colossal statues take nearly a year to build.