I know we have more to write about Kenya, but I thought we could jump ahead to our first weekend back in Valencia. It was time for the annual Fallas festival. According to Wikipedia, the festival was originally a celebration of spring when the local artisans would burn scrap wood that was used during the winter to hold candles (parots), which were no longer going to be needed as the days lengthened during spring. 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 link has a great explanation of the festival by the communitat of Valencia. It is, of course, a UNESCO world heritage festival.

These days, the festival starts on Friday and goes on until the following Tuesday. Each neighborhood builds wood, wire and papier-mache statues that are erected in the days before the festival starts in the middle of the streets.  This year there were about 800 statues.

The festival kicks off with fireworks in the town center at 2 p.m. and fireworks and firecrackers continue all day and all night. The city turns into a giant street fair, many of the roads are closed (if for no other reason than there are so many statues in the streets), next to each installation is a large tent – which we think are for the people who organize, design and build the statues, but we are not exactly sure.

The installations are anything from small, slightly larger than life size, to multi-story ones that occupy entire plazas.

Everyone has fireworks and they are lighting them off everywhere. It was ear-painfully loud.The neighborhoods have evening fireworks too, although it didn’t seem that they lit them off every day, but it was hard to tell.

Each day, and multiple times a day, there were marching bands parading around the streets with local people dressed in traditional costumes. Once again, we have no idea why or what schedule they ran, but every so often a parade would pass by our balcony. We were down on the street one time when one passed and so we walked along with it as it circled the block, back to the falla where it started.

Our block is between two neighborhoods, and so we had statues on each corner of our street. Here are what they looked like:

Sue and I wandered around looking at some of the larger and more elaborate installations. They are simply amazing with so much effort and design going into such temporary pieces (it reminds me of the sand mandalas that Buddhist monks create and then destroy). Here are some of the larger ones (yes, Frida Kahlo makes an appearance here too 😉):

There are lots of street vendors, selling fallas-related kitsch and the traditional food of fallas, one of which is churros. Mine was chocolate with chocolate filling. Yum.

The festival ends Tuesday night with the Cremá, the burning of the statues. Of all the installations, one is awarded a grand prize and a portion of it is placed in the Fallas museum. The rest are burned, but only after there is a huge fireworks display at each one (remember there are 800, so the air was thick with fireworks and thick black smoke from the burning fallas!). Here is one of the two of ours being burned, which we videoed from our balcony. It took a good hour for it to be totally consumed.

By Wednesday morning, almost everything was gone. The streets have been cleaned up, the tents are gone and the city goes back to being its mostly sleepy self. It is five days of extraordinary fun, noise, crowds, art and madness. We loved it.

And, what festival would be complete without a statue of the Stay Puft marshmallow man?

Finally, here are some of the winners from prior years that are in the museum. As you can see they only preserve part of the winning statue, called a ninot. The earliest ones date from the 1930s. This is a copy of the museum’s brochure in English.