'Fallas' festival to take place in September, 'Covid permitting'

ALL IS NOT lost for this year's huge Fallas festival in the Comunidad Valenciana – they will merely take place six months late.

Representatives of the eastern region's biggest annual fiesta met with the Valencian government this week, and agreed the Fallas would go ahead between September 1 and 5, 'Covid permitting'.

By then, it is hoped most of Spain's regions will be on track with their plan of having at least 70% of their headcount vaccinated, and the Comunidad Valenciana calculates it could be onto low-risk residents in their 40s or even 30s by early September.

Also, if the festival is held in the first week of that month, children and teens would not yet have gone back to school, and would be able to take part in the Fallas in full.

Some changes will, of course, be made, the regional government says.

Focusing on Valencia city – arguably the 'Falla capital', although not the only part of the region where they are celebrated – fiesta organisers are considering erecting the fallas, or colourful, house-sized papier mâché caricatures, on August 31; this setting-up session is known as the plantà.

A socially-distanced prizegiving has been agreed to, since it is this competitive element that gives the 'edge' to the fiestas, determining which of the fallas are the favourites, and dictating the order in which they are set light to.

The traditional flower-offering to the Virgin, or Ofrenda – where a giant wooden frame with Mary's head on is set up so that the bouquets, when slotted in one by one, make up her body and gown – will also take place, as this is one of the key events.

Unlike in previous years, if the September Fallas plan is able to proceed, the Ofrenda will take place over several days, so the groups of falleras, or 'fiesta girls' in traditional Valencian costume, can be much smaller, enabling them to keep a safe distance from each other.

Finally, the cremà, or burning, would be on September 5, when the fallas go up in flames one by one in order of losers to winners – an act which always appears to be a travesty but, in fact, ensures the continuity of the festival as falla artists spend the best part of a year building them and would be out of a job if they did not have to make replacements for their annually-destroyed works.

Other events – whether they will be on the programme or not, and in what format – are still being discussed. 

In Valencia city, this includes the Nit de Foc - literally, 'Night of Fire', or titanic firework display – and the daily mascletà, or noisy display of gunpowder bangers attached to overhead strings, a creation known as a traca, and let off in sequence.

Mascletaes normally bring in huge, squashed-up crowds into the city hall square when they explode at 14.00 on the dot, but the days of humans packing themselves like sardines into limited spaces are very much over.

Likewise, the presence of the casales, or the marquée attached to each falla where the group or commission representing it more or less lives for a week, eating, drinking and partying round the clock, will be very different from now on; their specific 'stamping ground' will probably be ringfenced and entirely open-air with a dedicated 'Covid coordinator' appointed to oversee safety measures.

The Fallas have always taken place over March 16 to 19, starting a few days earlier in Valencia city, with the cremà late at night on March 19 – Saint Joseph's Day, and also Father's Day in Spain – and the year 2020 saw them being cancelled for only the second occasion in peacetime in over 130 years.

This happened again in March 2021, but the fiesta might not be written off altogether this year, the way it was last year.

Two conditions have been set for the Fallas' being able to take place in early September, says regional president Ximo Puig: Firstly, for the 70% immunisation target to be reached, a figure considered to represent 'herd immunity'; secondly, for the incidence of Covid contagion to be consistently below 50 positives per 100,000 inhabitants, or 0.05% of the population.

This has mostly been the case in the Comunidad Valenciana for the past two months – many of its 542 towns and villages have no positives at all, some of the larger towns are in single figures only, and treble figures are only seen in big cities.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic sparked the unprecedented decision to axe the Fallas last year with just days to go before their start, the fiesta had never been called off in peacetime in living memory.

This had only happened once before, in 1886, when the fiesta-goers rebelled against a tax the city authorities had levied on the commissions for setting up their fallas in the street.

Otherwise, only the war in Cuba, when it was still a Spanish colony, and the Civil War, have ever put paid to the gigantic pageant.

As well as Valencia city, the Fallas are celebrated in practically every town and village in the province of Valencia, several in the province of Castellón, and in two or three of that of Alicante – Dénia being the main Fallas hub in the latter province, along with Pego, which has just three fallas, and Pamís, a tied hamlet of Ondara, which has one.

Technically, March 19 is a bank holiday in the whole of the Comunidad Valenciana, but other than in these three towns, it is only observed as such in the provinces of Castellón and Valencia.

It was in 2020 and also this year, despite the actual festival not going ahead.

Ximo Puig says it is up to other municipalities in the region to decide whether to join Valencia city in celebrating the Fallas in September, or whether to write them off for 2021 and plough their energy and resources into a better-than-ever Fallas in 2022.