Las Fallas!

Las Fallas is an annual festival in Valencia.  It's basically the biggest firework festival in the world. It originated when the carpenters of Valencia would take out all their winter junk and burn it.  Then the neighborhoods started turning the trash into funny sculptures.  And those trash sculptures have evolved to some amazing paper mâché statues.

This is Michelle and Dad in front of a sculpture making fun of Falleras (explained later).

Hollis in front of a tribute to music stars -Elvis is the big one.

This was the back of a funny one about different types of dreams.

This one was supposed to be about the Chinese taking over the world through various means.  However, the imagery was almost entirely Japanese (Samurai, Geisha, etc.) This highlights the fact that to most Spaniards, all Asians are Chinese.

 Each neighborhood (barrio) builds a falla.  They can prepare all year, but only have 24 hours to assemble the entire thing.  The fallas are judged and prizes are awarded (though I don't know if they win more than a "grand prize" banner and bragging rights). Then during the festival, the people from the neighborhood wear traditional Valencian dress and parade from their barrios to the central plaza where prizes are awarded for the different fallas.  Each neighborhood has its own band too, so it's a fun little parade.  The women in traditional dress are called Falleras.

(Some falleras) 

(a cute little Fallera)

Oh, the costumes are handed down for generations.  And all the girls wear matching high heeled pumps.  The pumps are covered in embroidery that matches the dresses.

Over a two-day period, the Falleras (women and girls) parade through the streets with la ofrenda, or the offering for the Virgin Mary.  Each Fallera carries a small bouquet of red, white, pink, or yellow flowers and adds them to a scaffolding.  The flowers eventually create the robes of a giant Mary statue.

The two small boys at her feet are two martyrs.

And the most entertaining part of Las Fallas:  The FIREWORKS!  For the entire festival period (five or six days) you can hear fireworks going off at all hours.  And you have to be aware where you are walking because firecrackers could go off at your feet!  And we aren't talking tiny little ones.  Some of these are bigger than M-80s.  And because the EU has banned these fireworks, they are all made and sold locally.

Hollis was so excited and waited in line at a firework shop to buy fireworks.  He got several boxes of lady-finger sized fire crackers, some bottle rockets, bumble bees, and pitardos muy grandes (really big fire crackers).  I'm not sure if they were the biggest size you could buy (I don't think they were) but they were plenty huge.

(Hollis holding some pitardos grandes)

I blew up firecrackers for the first time in my life and it was really fun!  And lady fingers are nearly so dangerous as I always imagined (because they are illegal in the US).  Also, every day at 1 PM there was an auditory firework show called the mezcleta.  There's a really big one in the government plaza, but each barrio has one as well.

This is a picture over the city of Valencia during a mezcleta.  You can see how smoky it gets from all the fireworks.  (This is why the EU banned the festival - for pollution reasons.  They totally had it anyway and made statues that made fun people in the EU governing committee.)

We got a video of a neighborhood mezcleta.  It was pretty benign compared to some of the ones we heard.

And this one is us walking through the old riverbed.  We could hear mezcletas from all around the city.  Near the end, we could hear the teramoto (earthquake) that is a signature mark that finishes all Valencian firework shows.

 

There were also some awesome night time firework shows.  The best I've ever seen (they put Disneyland to shame) and they were at midnight or 1 AM every night.  We didn't try to take pictures of those, we just enjoyed it immensely.

Then, on the last night, they set those beautiful fallas on fire!  The fire department has to constantly hose down the surrounding buildings because the fallas are built right between them and the fires get huge!  I had to go back before this because I had to work in the morning, but Hollis took a couple of pictures of the fires that just don't do them justice.