Falllas

This past week, Valencia celebrated their festival of fallas. The festival was created in honor of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. In ancient times, carpenters would burn the wood that they had left over from projects as an offering to Saint Joseph for wealth in their business. It has become a festival where people spend all year building these amazing sculptures to have displayed for this festival that takes place from the 15 through the 19 of March. Master carpenters spend all year building these sculptures (no longer made out of wood for safety reasons) only to have them judged and the ones that do no win the first place prize and then burned on the last day of the festival at “La Crema.”
There are hundreds of sculpture build and they vary in size. They all have a common theme and they are judged in different categories based on size. Until this year there had been no restrictions on size, but this upcoming year there will be limits imposed on how tall the fallas can be and how much money people are allowed to spend to build them. People that want to build the best falla stop at no expense to build them, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build these amazing works of art. Since there are hundreds of fallas, they are located throughout the city and unless you spend all five days of the festival there, it is pretty much impossible to see all of them. The top ones are the ones that people are most interested in seeing, but it is amazing to see the other ones as well.
The city is crowded with people, both from the city and tourists, who gather to see these amazing works of art. Like Castellon during Magdalena, they also have mascletas and fireworks shows (fire and making noise I have learned is something that is popular in the Valencian Community). In addition to the fireworks and the fallas, there are also parades that take place, the most popular being the one where that falleras, the people who have commissioned a falla and are dressed in the traditional outfits, carry flowers to a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary and create her dress out of the flowers.

The parade was ongoing, starting the first day with the junior fallera queen and ending the last day with the senior fallera queen, and is an amazing sight to see.
On the last day of the festival, La Creama takes place. The burning takes place at midnight on the last night of the festival and the falla in front of the Ayuntamiento (city hall) is traditionally the last to be burned. Fireworks are placed on the sculpture and lit and thus the falla is burned.
I was able to go down and see the festival on the 18th, the second to last day of the festival and was able to see tons of the fallas and get to experience the tradition that is known throughout Europe. Everywhere you went the streets were crowded with people, even though people did not have the day off. Friday, the entire Valencian Community had a day off and everyone goes down to Valencia to see the fallas so I can’t imagine how many more people were there since it was already super crowded when I was there. I went down with a friend who is from Chile and we walked around all day and tried to see as many of the fallas that we could see. We were able to meet up with friends that were from Valencia and they showed us some of the most popular fallas that we hadn’t seen during that day and there were completely amazing. We literally spend all day walking around the city; we arrived to Valencia at 10 a.m. and caught a train back at 2:50 a.m. and it was completely worth it just being able to see something that I might not be able to see again.