Valencia

I stepped through the looking glass into this unbelievable Spanish port city with two colleagues, after 19 hours in the air. We descended through some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen—as-black-as-the-keys-on-my-laptop black—and I began to wonder if I would be able to breathe after we landed. On the contrary, the air seems fresh and beautiful down here, perhaps because it is being cleansed by the breeze off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to develop theories about where the smoke might be coming from.

The Nineteen Days of Burning
The patron saint of Valencia is St. Joseph the carpenter. You see statues of him in the cathedrals and churches, which are easy to identify because he is carrying a two-by-four. From the connection to carpentry comes a local tradition, dating to the middle ages, that prior to the feast of St. Joseph on March 19, you should burn any scraps of wood you happen to have around the house. The next phase involved the logical step of saying why stop with scraps of wood, when you could equally well take the opportunity to burn any old furniture you had kicking around. I’m not sure what the other steps might have been, but in its present incarnation, the Fallas in Valencia consists of thousands of people building hundreds of giant wooden sculptures, “dolls” people said “as large as buildings” then setting fire to them all on the same night—March 19. The designs are too large to move, and have to be shipped in pieces to the places in the city where they will eventually be assembled, displayed, judged, and burned. I have heard estimates ranging from 400 to 1000 of these objects will appear all over the city beginning March 15, at a total annual cost of something like 300,000 euros.

Mascleta—“a symphony in gunpowder”
Prior to March 19, there are 19 days of explosions. Everyone gathers in a particular square at 2 pm. We went on the Sunday, and the crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages was so thick that I had something happen to me that has never happened before. I was following a string of people moving through a heavy crowd on both sides. Suddenly the line stopped moving, and I realized that as far as I could see ahead, for blocks in fact, no one was walking anymore. So I looked back, and no one was walking there either. I was immobile in the middle of a packed crowd. What we were all waiting for was a series of about 5 minutes of continuous explosions, like a fireworks display, except it is only sound. The windows rattle in the buildings nearby. You can feel it vibrating in your body. There is a steady orchestration of small explosions, punctuated by larger ones, until the climax which is almost unbearably powerful but consists of just an overwhelming number of small explosions. The air fills with the gunpowder smoke. It is like nothing I have ever experienced.

Firecrackers
A city that spends 19 days exploding things in preparation for setting fire to a thousand public sculptures is a city that appreciates loud and unexpected noises, and the kids seem to enthusiastically embrace this ethos. Boys and girls of all ages carry boxes of firecrackers, usually 100 to a box, and can be seen in all the parks and streets, with either lighters or matches or else borrowing their parents’ burning cigarettes to light them. And these aren’t the mild little snappy firecrackers that I remember from my youth. These ones pack a punch. I’m not sure if my nerves will ever recover.

Churros
Nearly as ubiquitous as firecrackers are doughnuts. Made fresh on the not-infrequent stands that sell them, they are available in a traditional doughnut shape, but more common are these long stringy loops, textured with straight ridges that run the entire length, delicious and sprinkled with sugar.

The Palace of the Arts and Sciences
One of the words that appears occasionally in the city collateral is “irony,” and I think the writers might be on to something. As an example, take the postmodern architecture of Santiago Calatrava at the Palace of the Arts and Sciences, where you have a conquistador’s helmet, a giant eyeball, somebody’s spine, and a harp. They respectively house concerts, an iMax theatre, a science museum, and I’m not sure what. On the far end there is also an aquarium. The path leading to the complex is lined with giant photos enriched with pop quotations from song lyrics and the Dalai Lama and so on. The path leading from the complex has cheerful, colourful cubist sculptures by Juan Ripollés of people with giant heads, wearing suns, clocks, and their hearts on their sleeves. As Teresa pointed out, everyone walking along the lane of sculptures was smiling and laughing.

A River Used to Run Through It
Until the 1950s, when they experienced a series of devastating floods, there was a river running through the middle of Valencia. Then they moved it outside the city, and converted the entire course of the old river into a long, serpentine green space, with parks and playing fields and ornamental orange groves bearing the sourest oranges imaginable. All the bridges are also still in place, making it simple and easy to cross from one side of the park to the other. The bridge outside our hotel is loaded on both side with flowers, and there are palm trees that grow from the river bed up through the surface of the bridge to provide shade.

Children in Disguise
As if the firecrackers weren’t evidence enough that the Valencians love their children, there is the further observation that the children are often seen running around in costume. I first noticed it on the plane, when a five year old in a wizard’s hat as big as he was exited just ahead of me. I thought it might be exceptional until I spotted two or three other costumes in the crowd. What finally cinched it was the Sunday morning sight of two formally dressed parents being accompanied into the cathedral by a two-and-a-half-foot tall version of Zorro, the desert fox.