I had last Thursday and Friday off from work, so I attended the last two days of Las Fallas, an annual festival in Valencia. "Las Fallas" refers to the celebration of Saint Joseph's Day, from March 15 - 19, but also, fallas (or falles in Valencian) is the word for "fire." The focus of the festival is the display and destruction of ninots, huge statues made out of cardboard, wood, plaster, and paper maché. Artists create the ninots, which are sponsored by local companies and organizations, and take almost the entire year to construct.
The highlight of the festival is the last night, on March 19th, when all of the statues are burned, except for one. The audience votes and decides which one should be spared.
The falla below was the biggest one of all. It towered was above me and was probably at least 60 feet tall. I wasn't able to capture all of it in one picture, just bits and pieces of it.
The Hotel Biopark falla (above) was also the last one to burn, and I took pictures of the burning (la crema in Vallencian), so I'll come back to it. Here are a couple of the ones I saw:
There were also a lot of smaller statues, or fallas infantiles, with kid-friendly themes. Below is one of El Bosc Encantat. The name is in Vallencian Spanish, but means The Enchanted Forest" in English, or "El Bosque Encantado" in Castellano).
There were tons of fireworks (fuegos artificials) and random music and commercialism. There was a guy in a Mickey Mouse costume walking around and also a disgruntled clown.
Last of all, there were the cremas:
No comments:
Post a Comment