The unquestioned highlight of Las Fallas, a festival held each year between March 15 and 19 in Valencia, Spain, is in its final hours, when the gigantic scenes inhabited by figures as tall as 20 feet are set ablaze simultaneously throughout the city. Although the week has been filled with fireworks displays, fiery parades and tons of explosives, it is all leading up to the moment when the ninots – giant cartoon figures made of polystyrene – become bonfires that reach as high as the surrounding buildings.
Origins of Las Fallas
Las Fallas means the fires, and began centuries ago when the city’s many furniture makers cleaned their workshops of winter’s accumulated wood scraps and candle ends, throwing them into the streets to be burned on St Joseph’s Day. Little papier mache images were added, growing in size and artistry over the years and multiplying into entire scenes (cadafals) with dozens of giant figures. Most recently, polystyrene has replaced papier mache as a building material.
These highly artistic and usually satirical scenes are admired for a few days, judged and on the final night torched by carefully strung explosives. In a few minutes, each is reduced to a little mound of ashes.
Burning of the Fallas
On that final night, beginning at about 11 pm, the spectacular climax begins in the center of the city, the huge Plaza del Ayuntamiento. The plaza is filled to bursting with people – the crowds extend solid through all the broad streets leading into the square, and every window with a view over the scene is filled with more. The focal point is the giant cadafal in front of the city hall, always the most elaborate of all those in Valencia. Beside it is the smaller Children’s Falla; both are wired with strings of explosives that lead back to the door of the city hall, where a group of elaborately dressed women and girls are waiting.
The Children’s Falla
At 11 pm, one of the little girls lights the string of explosives leading to the Children’s Falla, and all of them start crying as the entire thing bursts into flames. Within minutes it is gone, its supporting timbers falling to applause from the crowd. This is the preamble to the next two hours. At this point, visitors need to decide which to do, stay in the Plaza and hold onto the tiny spot they have there, or work their way out and head for the nearest neighborhood Falla, only a block behind the City Hall. At midnight it – and every other one in the city -- goes up in flames, while firemen hose down the adjacent buildings, which are perilously close to the flames.
The Grand Finale of Las Fallas
At 1 am, it’s back to the Plaza del Ayuntamiento for the torching of the final Falla, in front of the City Hall. It is accompanied by music (Valencia, the re-occurring song that hums in everyone’s head for the entire festival), fireworks, cheering and a fire that lights the whole sky briefly, before the timbers fall and it’s all over. Not quite, since people stay out all night in a giant street party that ends around dawn.
Barbara Rogers - Traveler, writer and guidebook author with a passion for those lands that border the Mediterranean Sea and the neighboring Atlantic ...
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