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There must be something peculiar in Spanish blood – they have strange ways of making fun. In Pamplona in the north they enjoy being chased by furious bulls during the San Fermin festival.
Bunyol has the annual Tomato Flight – La Tomatina – that turns the whole town into a giant Blood Mary without the cocktail glass.
And in Valencia the folks go even wilder.
In this mediaeval city, where Conjunto Cathedral supposedly houses the Holy Grail, they set off all kinds of pyrotechnic explosives and “burn” the place down – for fun.
Welcome to Las Fallas Fiesta – the Festival of Fire.
“Hundreds of huge puppets are created and placed in the intersections,” guide Eva Crespo explains. “They stay there for the five days of celebration and parties, and then on the last night we burn every piece to the ground. It’s fun!”
A series of airborne hops – Singapore, Milan, Barcelona – will get you to Valencia for Las Fallas, but any jetlag you might feel will have to make way for the brass bands that emerge from their home neighbourhoods to roam the Old Town.
Trumpets, drums and flugelhorns certainly make vibrant music, but as far as fuelling the fiesta spirit, that’s nothing compared to the deafening sound of people constantly tossing firecrackers around everywhere you go.
“This is the wakeup call,” says Crespo.
Las Fallas is believed by some to have begun in the Middle Ages as a purifying ritual, a time to cleanse the body and soul, if not an excuse to drink in the middle of the street after a long, depressing winter.
Valencian carpenters, it’s said, amassed their scrap wood and burned it to celebrate the spring equinox.
These days the citizens celebrate satire.
Assisted by art students, the different neighbourhoods erect 30metrehigh monuments of polyurethane and soft cork that bear clusters of giant effigies – usually politicians or celebrities.
These are the fallas.
“This is a good one, making fun of the Spanish water issue,” giggles Luisa Forner next to a massive assortment of puppets set up beside the gothic fort of Serranos.
“Valencia depends on the Catalonians in Barcelona for some of its water supply, and that bugs us from time to time.”
So here is a likeness of Prime Minister Zapatero sitting happily on a toilet reading the newspaper, while hammering impatiently on the door is one of the well-known politicos from Valencia City Hall, waiting his turn.
There are about 700 of these sculptures scattered all around. A gigantic boxing ring has Barack Obama knocking out George Bush.
But the mother of all fallas is in Ayuntamiento Square, facing the Renaissanceera City Hall. The colourful array has a giraffe, elephant, ostrich and gorilla, all eight storeys high. People play around in front of the beasts, grabbing photo opportunities.
All through the festival, the streets are bustling with stalls selling fried snacks such as xurros and bunyols, as well as roast chestnuts.
Negotiating your way through the jam you discover someone cooking paella in the middle of the road. You catch whiffs of the spices, tempting even when they mingle with the tang of gunpowder.
Around midday on March 17, two days before the big, flaming fallas crescendo, I find myself trapped inside a streetside bar as thousands of revellers of all ages, their heads adorned with blueandwhite scarves, fill the oval space in front of City Hall.
Everyone is eager for the Mascleta – the thunderous daytime show of fireworks.
“Mascleta is like a concert of gunpowder,” enthuses a guidebook, but that doesn’t come close to preparing you for the spectacle.
The first huge bang occurs at 2 in the afternoon. Hundreds more follow, ranging from the merely deafening to groundquaking eruptions.
It goes on for six minutes. What is to Valencians a “concert” is more like a war zone to their guests, with one thunderous blast after another. You’d think it would wake El Cid, the city’s revered author, from the dead, interrupting his Don Quixote dreams.
There is a rhythm to the incessant pounding, though, and I wonder if the famously deaf Beethoven has been reborn as a Spanish maestro of pyrotechnics. Only Valencia could convince you that explosions are a musical composition.
“Valencians are really fond of gunpowder, and we’re famous for pyrotechnics,” Crespo says, somewhat unnecessarily. She and her fellow townsfolk want visitors to know the city has more to share than oranges and paella.
“With heat, light, smoke and explosives, you always win the crowd in Valencia,” she beams.
Finally the night of the climax arrives. The smaller sculptures scattered around the neighbourhoods are the first to go up in flames.
The highlight is called La Crema, when the 30metre giants at City Hall are engulfed. Around midnight I flow with the crowd into Ayuntamiento Square, jockeying for the best view.
Fed by the same craziness that makes the swift runners of Pamplona want to dance on bulls’ horns, you hanker to get as close as possible to the conflagration, playing push-and-pull with the police manning the safety barriers.
La Crema begins with another six-minute Mascleta barrage of blasts, and after a couple of days of it I’m finding the thunder addictive. You hope the next bang will be even louder, vibrating deeper.
Valencians spend a year raising the needed funds and months building the fallas, but it takes less than 10 minutes to burn them to the ground. Wood is reduced to ashes and dust returns to dust.
The crowd disperses, leaving the embers behind, to join vibrant street parties elsewhere. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning – far too early for Valencians to think of sleep.


If you go …
Thai Airways International flies between Bangkok and Madrid, and Valencia is another flight of about 30 minutes from the capital. La Fallas takes place annually from March 15 to 19.