Valencian Festival
Would like to share with you other famous festivals in Valencia region. In popular festivals, it is very common to make giant paellas to feed all the people coming for free.
Guiness record of giant paella - in Madrid
Las Fallas - held on 15th to the 19th of March each year
St Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, is the official focus for the festival. It all started back in the Middle Ages when carpenters used to hang up planks of wood called parots in the winter to support their candles when they were working. At the onset of spring these pieces of wood would be burned, as a way of celebrating the end of dark winter working days. After a while, they began to put clothing on the parot, and then started to try to make it identifiable with a well-known local personality. These became the forerunners of the contemporary ninots, the enormous cardboard, wood, polyurethane, Styrofoam, cork, plaster and papier maché figures of today. The authorities later decided to link the burning of the parots with Saint Joseph’s Day – to try to stop it getting out of control!
Nowadays, each neighbourhood has an organised committee, the casal faller, who raise the necessary finances for constructing the ninots. There is even an area of the city, ciutat fallera, where whole groups of workers and designers spend months creating all the incredible towering tableaux. The ninots, which are placed at key places throughout the city, are nowadays often cruel satirical lampoons of well-known Spanish and international celebrities or politicians.
If you decide to go to Valencia, prepare for an early start. Every day of the Fallas begins with a startling wake-up call, La Despertà, at the ridiculous time of 8 a.m. You’ll just love being woken by brass bands marching down the streets accompanied by those preposterously loud firecrackers; which themselves activate car and shop alarms – just to make sure you’re ready for a day’s fun.
All day, you’ll see processions and hear explosions and then at 2 in the afternoons, La Mascletà, begins – when there are organised pyrotechnical explosions all over the city, especially in the Plaza Ayuntamiento. You will think they are earth-shattering; but they’re just an appetizer for what will come later.
On each night there is a firework display in the old river bed and they escalate in degrees of spectacle until the final night, 19th March, the Night of Fire – La Nit de Foc. This is the famous event when the enormous creations are destroyed. Neighbourhoods will have their own falla infantile for the children at about 10 in the evening and then, at around midnight, the neighbourhood fallas will begin. The final, grandest fire, in the main square, Plaza Ayuntamiento, won’t get under way until 1 am at the earliest. The ninots will all have been stuffed full with fireworks, the street lights switched off and the bomberos will be in position when the 20 to 30 foot models, which took months of painstaking construction, will be razed to the ground. Each year, one ninot is spared the ordeal – as a result of a public vote: the rest suffer a spectacular fate.
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