Fallas: build-up to the biggest street festival in the world?

One small piece of one relatively small Falla... out of around 700 Fallas currently installed throughout Valencia

We're already at day two of the official Fallas festival here in Valencia. It runs annually (officially) from 14 to 19 March each year, culminating in the celebrations of St Joseph's Day on Wednesday 19 March.


The Falla outside our apartment on Avenida de Francia. It's closest point is less than five metres from the apartment block. What will happen on Wednesday during la cremà when the whole lot goes up in flames? Better check the insurance policy!

Whilst we may be at only the second day, it seems that the festival has been going on, at least in part, since 20 March 2007 - the formal end of last year's celebrations mean the immediate start to preparations for the following year's events.

This festival is so vast in every sense of the word - it encompasses the true community involvement of all the city's residents (the city claims a current population just below 800,000 but this figure is said to swell to more than three million during Fallas); the sheer sums of money involved (all private funding - not a penny of subsidy!); the scale of the event - as many as 700 Fallas statues across the city, ranging in budget from €6,000 to €900,000 (rumour has it) - some of them as high as 20 metres; the marching bands (official figures state that there are over 300 marching bands in the city alone); the daily mascletàs at the Ayuntamiento (town hall square); and now across the city every day, the nightly fireworks in the Turia riverbed; the hundreds if not thousands of marquees set-up alongside each Falla - adorned with banners and hoardings from the Fallas sponsors; the temporary refreshment stands everywhere stocked with buñuelos and hot chocolate, horchatas with fartons (cold drink made from tiger-nuts with dunking doughnuts!); the hundreds of thousands of children as young as three or four huddled in groups with their burning wicks, setting light to the petardos, bombetas and on occasion, huge firecrackers, rockets and other explosive devices (rumour has it the EU tried to ban children from buying and throwing fireworks in Valencia, but somehow the legislation failed - the region has to amend its own legislation each year to permit children to buy and throw fireworks from 1-20 March), the daily deafening wake-up call at 8.00am of la despertà - a cacophony of marching bands and petardos liberally blasted up and down each street, giving a formal welcome to the day's festivities (firework-throwing seems to run to an approximate timetable of 8.00am to 4.00am the following day, though not everyone abides by the four-hour ceasefire!); the endless parades of floats, bands, horses and more... much more besides...


The sheer scale of these structures is mind-boggling. Las Vegas would rank a poor second to some of these giants!

We have never seen anything like it, and there are another three full days to go before a series of concluding events.

The mascletàs have been going off every day at the Ayuntamiento - and elsewhere - since 1 March, and this is set to continue up until Wednesday 19 March, when at 2.00pm, the final mascletà promises to be the longest and loudest series of explosions we have ever heard. So far, the daily events have averaged around 7-8 minutes, getting progressively louder with each successive minute - indeed each successive day! This is perhaps the most audible evidence that Fallas is just around the corner. Indeed as I write this on Sunday afternoon, the siesta is interrupted every few seconds with an explosion - and every few minutes, the sounds of a marching band. From 2.00pm onwards we were able to no only hear but to see around half a dozen mascletàs being set off across the city over the tops of buildings across a panorama from our apartment.

There's still another 10 hours of Sunday to go but we can now understand why they say the city doesn't sleep whilst Fallas is in town...