Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The City is Burning

What do Spaniards do for St. Patty´s day? Just about all of them party, some go to that Irish pub down the street, some even to Ireland. But the same weekend as St. Patricks day is also the Fesival de Las Fallas in Valencia.
Las Fallas is a longstanding tradition in Valencia, an ancient city on the southwestern coast of Spain. They build huge paper machet sculptures, sort of like floats, that tell stories. They´re massive, colorful, must take months to think up and build, and at the end, they burn.
It may sound trivial at first, but its actually a culturally rich festival. Groups of 20-100 men women and children dressed in ancient roman clothing parade through the streets singing, dancing, and followed by a marching band. Everyone and their mother has fireworks, noisemakers, or just things that blow up. Its not a rare sight to see a three year old lighting and tossing a firecracker into the middle of the street.
Most of the roads in the city are blocked off to make room for the hoards of people pushing, stampeding to see the Fallas. There are 385 total in the city, one at each major intersection.
Everyday at 2 pm they would have a fireworks show loud enough to cripple your ear drums and maybe make you think you´re in a war zone. Its hard not to cringe and flinch at gunpowder exploding right below your feet.
Finally, at midnight on Monday night they have the biggest firework show of them all, and they light the first Falla to burn. The crowd resembles Times Square on New Year´s Eve. Nobody even so much as thinks of St. Patrick. The whole crowd is enthralled, ooing and ahhing at the colorful explosions in the sky. And finally, the chain reaction of explosions works its way to the top of the sculpture and fire erupts.
Everyones got a little pyromaniac in them.
The heat tans your face, and the crowd makes you sweat, but the sight distracts you from feeling any of it. It seems like a lot of work to spend 364 days building these massive, impressive sculptures just to burn them. And maybe to some it seems a little wasteful- but until you go for yourself you won´t understand the magic of Las Fallas.

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