Las Fallas 2011

Yesterday I took a day trip with other university students to Valencia, Spain for the annual festival called Las Fallas. It is basically a 5 day festival to honor Saint Joseph. Different groups building fallas, a foam-like statue, that are set up all over the city and judged in a contest. On the last night, La Crema (also last night), the losers are burned until only the winner remains. More than this happens throughout the week, and if you want to know more you can find the info on wikipedia.org but this much of the festival is what I saw.

Yesterday we spent the entire day watching fireworks, running from fireworks, looking at fallas, searching for a map, paella, then agua de valencia, crowd swimming, wishing we could find benches, wishing we had more clothes on, dancing in an awesome club, and finally wishing we could hurry up a get back home to Murcia because we were so tired. (The bus ride one way from Murcia to Valencia is around 3.5 hours.)


There was so many people there during the day! Walking took forever. We eventually found a map and started navegating the side streets to get around.

This is a falla mayor, which just designates it as a big one instead of a little one. In the bottom left corner you can use the girl´s head to get a picture of how big this falla actually is.


This is an example of the back of one of the fallas. This one however, I believe, was protesting against the content of Spanish television. None of the others had underlying messages that I noticed. This one was defintely hard to miss.


At night starting around 10, they begin to burn the fallas who haven´t won. First, fire crackers shoot from them towards the sky, then it catches on fire and burns until completely consumed.

It seemed to me that during the festival, the entire city shuts down to go out and party. At least, on Saturday the only thing open was bars, restaurants, and chino shops. All ages of people were out on the street celebrating.

At the end of the night we went to Super Club 95, and I have to say I was impressed. Normally it costs 12 euros to enter but our program fee included the entrance so we got in for free. It was very posh and extremely large. There were 2 levels and 4 different bars. The music was amazing. All in all, I loved it and wish we had one here in Murcia.