Semana Santa, Day One: Las Fallas

As a quick preface, I have the feeling that this entry is going to be ridiculously long (not that I'm not normally verbose), so you may want to save it for some time when you can sit and read for a while. Like when you're at work or something. I'm also going to split my "weekend" up into a couple of entries, because a lot of way-cool things happened.

Thanks to Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Catalonia's own holiday on Monday, I'm at the tail end of a super-long vacation. I also took last Wednesday off, since my friend/coworker, Thor, had some friends visiting and they were going to go on a mini-excursion to Valencia to see Las Fallas, which ended on Wednesday. The office was essentially dead on Monday and Tuesday anyway, so I don't think I missed much. So Wednesday morning, at the pleasant hour of 6:30 a.m., 5 of us packed into a Seat Leon, the biggest small car in Europe, and headed down the AP7 toward Valencia. (Actually, I have no verification of that statement, but taking a road trip with 5 people in a hatchback definitely seemed like a Euro thing to do.) A little after 9:00 we breached the outskirts of the city and by 9:45 we were parked and wandering around the city, checking out the various Fallas that were planted at various intersections. Later on the news I heard that something like 400 streets in Valencia were closed to accommodate the Fallas and accompanying celebrations. And I thought Boston shutting down for Patriots' Day was big-time.

Quick aside on Las Fallas--while a quick Wikipedia search should give you most of the details, I'll cover the basics. A Falla is a giant wood, cardboard, and paper mâché monument, typically between 2-4 stories tall and made up of a stand/landscape and a collection of ninots, aka ginormous dolls. Each community/neighborhood in Valencia spends all year constructing one, so that in total there are 500+ Fallas at a combined expense that runs into the millions of Euros. Then, throughout the week, starting the a bit before Easter, there are a whole bunch of events: fireworks displays, bands, etc, all culminating in the final celebration on March 19th, St. Joseph's Day, which this year was on Wednesday, and was what we trekked out to see. So now I'll tell you all about that.

First, some Fallas in the streets, during our morning walk:

Also, I should note that while on the whole, Valencia was fairly quiet between 10 and noon, the morning calm was regularly broken up by the pops and cracks of firecrackers and other explosives, mostly launched by little, unsupervised children. By the afternoon, one member of our group estimated that we heard such explosions, on average, every 1-3 seconds. Unfortunately, we couldn't get our hands on any firecrackers; most stores were closed due to the holiday so I think we would have had to stock up earlier.

Around 1 p.m. we headed to the Plaza de Ayuntamento, or the town square, to get situated for the 2 p.m. mascletada. Here we are waiting:

There is apparently a mascletada every day of the Las Fallas celebration, but the one on St. Joseph's Day is the big one, and the square and surrounding streets were already packed. Oh, did I explain what the macletada is yet? I think not. Well, basically it's a huge blowing-up of things. It starts with some fireworks, fairly standard:

but eventually devolves into a giant mess of firecrackers and noise. Like, serious noise.

It.
Was.
AWESOME.

If you haven't gotten the sense yet that Las Fallas is a crazy party of general raucousness and stuff blowing up, then I am very poor writer.

After the mascletada, we wandered back up to the north of the city where we had rented an apartment, to move our stuff out of the car and take a little siesta. The apartment was pretty nice, and a lucky find on Loquo (the Spanish Craigslist where I found my apt.), as every single hotel and hostel in the city was booked for essentially the whole week. Yes, yes, Las Fallas is a GIANT PARTY. Anyway, so we rested up a bit, then picked up some supplies at OpenCor, an overpriced, low-quality 24 hr. store that was the only thing open during the holiday. Finally, around 11 p.m., we hit the streets again, to watch the last event of Las Fallas, La Cremada. Using your awesome root-word deductive skills, I'll give you a moment to guess what that means, and no, it has nothing to do with half-and-half.

Got it yet? Remember what I said about Las Fallas being about explosions and noise? Well, La Cremada, literally, is "The Cremation," and that is exactly what it is, because at midnight, they BURN ALL OF THE STATUES!! WHHHATT????!! Yeah, it's kind of amazing. 500 multi-story structures, a year's work and several thousand Euros each, up in flames, all throughout the city of Valencia. Basically, they wrap each one with firecrackers, light the end of the string and... POW! Of course, I took pictures:



SO COOL. Fire codes be damned... heh. Anyway, for completeness' sake, they actually save the very last Falla, the "winner" for it's own extra-special burning at 1 a.m., but because I was being tired and a poop I missed it! A couple people in our group did see it though, and from the pictures it looks like it was awesome. I guess I'll have to come back for Las Fallas another year! But here's a picture of it pre-burning:


and here are some of the Cremada (mid-page).

There you have it. Day one of my six-day weekend. Long, as promised. :) There's much much more, but I'll come back to it later. For now, I'll leave you with my Picasa album.

¡Saludos! ¡Os echo de menos todos! Me enviad cartas, por favor...
(Bye! I miss you all! Please send letters...)