The Spanish port city of Valencia explodes (quite literally) each March, when neighborhoods all over the city build huge scenes of cartoon-like figures, some as high as 20 feet, to be admired for a few days, then torched into bonfires at the same moment. But throughout this spectacle are other events visitors won’t want to miss. Get a full schedule at a hotel, tourist office or online and circle these highlights.
Mascletà at the City Hall
Daily at 2 p.m., a massive concert of fireworks and explosives is set off, filling half the enormous Plaza del Ayuntamiento; the other half of the square is filled with thousands of people. After about five minutes of ear-shattering explosives that fill the sky with smoke, the decibels are ratcheted up a few notches in a crescendo that literally makes the earth shake and surrounding buildings shudder. Smaller neighborhood mascletàs are even more astonishing, although not as large, because the charges are strung through narrow streets, exploding only inches from building fronts. Especially colorful is the Mascletà and surrounding street fair in the waterfront quarter of Cabañal.
Ofrenda de Flores a la Virgen de los Desamparados
By contrast to this chaos of noise, in the plaza in front of the cathedral (Plaza de la Virgen) on March 17 and 18, a steady procession of women and girls wearing magnificent silk dresses streams into the square to present bouquets of flowers to a towering statue of the Virgin Mary. As they hand over the flowers the mesh framework grows, bouquet after bouquet, into an ornately patterned robe.
They come from all over the province, accompanied by bands playing as they walk in rows five or six wide along designated routes from all sides of the city. As they converge on the plaza, each band strikes up the city’s theme song, Valencia. It is an emotional moment for most of the women, when they step into the plaza and see Valencia's patron saint, Our Lady of the Forsaken, rising in her half-finished robes. It’s the only place in the city where the faint smell of explosives and fireworks is replaced by the fragrance of flowers, and the chaos by elegance and order.
Nit de Foc (Night of Fire)
The night of March 17 (actually March 18, since it’s after midnight) at about 2 a.m., the former Turia river bed, now a wide green park, is lighted with a massive fireworks display. While there are fireworks here at 1:30 a.m. each night throughout Las Fallas, this is the most spectacular, featuring the latest pyrotechnics. The best viewing is from the bridges that still span the former river.
Cabalgata del Foc (Fire Parade)
About 7 p.m. on March 19, the final day of Las Fallas, Calle Colón turns into a street of fire with a parade of fire-throwing demons, fire-breathing dragons and a moving inferno inhabited by devils and dark creatures who appear surrounded by flames. It’s not for the faint-of-heart, since the flames and explosives often sweep perilously close to the lines of spectators on the curbs. It’s the last lead-up to that night’s marathon of fires.
Burning of the Fallas
By 11 p.m. on the last night, the huge Plaza del Ayuntamiento is packed solid with people and more crowds fill all the streets leading into the square, awaiting the burning of the giant cadafal in front of the city hall. First, the smaller Children’s Falla is torched off and burned to the ground. Then at midnight all the neighbourhood Fallas are burned – the famous bonfires the festival is known for – and at 1 a.m. the last of them, in Plaza del Ayuntamiento becomes the biggest bonfire of all, falling in a cacophony of explosives, fireworks, music and cheering.
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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