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A year of work, burned in a night
Las Fallas runs in Valencia from the fifteenth to the nineteenth of March and it is one of the strangest and best festivals in Europe. UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list in 2016. The structure is this. Neighbourhoods organise themselves into comisiones falleras, hundreds of them across the city, and each spends the year raising money and commissioning a falla — a monument several storeys high, built of wood, papier-mâché and, for decades now, polystyrene, made up of dozens of individual figures called ninots. The subjects are satirical: local politicians, national scandals, whatever the year produced. They are installed at street intersections in the middle of March, so the city becomes an open-air exhibition of enormous comic sculpture, and then on the night of the nineteenth every one of them is burned where it stands. Around that runs the noise. Each afternoon during the festival there is a mascletà in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento: not a firework display but a percussive one, several minutes of coordinated explosions designed to be felt rather than seen, building to a final crescendo. It is genuinely physical — the Fallera's lo sientes en el pecho is literal — and it is the thing visitors are least prepared for. Valencia has a relationship with gunpowder that is difficult to exaggerate; children set off firecrackers in the street for the whole week. One figure survives each year. The ninot indultat — the pardoned ninot, in Valencian — is chosen by public vote and goes to a museum instead of the fire. Everything else becomes ash by morning, and the streets are swept and the city goes back to work. Two practical notes. If you go, book a long way ahead and expect to walk everywhere, because the centre is closed to traffic and packed. And take earplugs to the mascletà — not as a joke; locals bring them for children, and the sound pressure is high enough to matter. The right way to watch it is with your mouth slightly open, which is what everyone around you will be doing, because it equalises the pressure.