Spain always forces us to jettison our routines and stretch our comfort zone as we embrace an 11 p.m. dinner hour followed by live music into the early morning. But Fallas takes that to an extreme. Here’s a diary of how, to borrow the subtitle of the classic “Dr. Strangelove,’’ we “learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.’’
March 18, 2 p.m. A madcap spectacle
Fallas makes a mockery of the calendar, with the days beginning around noon and ending around dawn. At midafternoon we joined the throngs milling from square to square to see the elaborate sculptured scenes — sweet ones for children and bigger, bawdier ones for adults — erected at every crossroads.
The origins of the Fallas festival are vague but seem to lie in the 18th century practice of Valencian carpenters celebrating spring by burning their winter lampposts. A century later, the lampposts had morphed into elaborate satirical figures that would all be burned in a main plaza on St. Joseph’s Day (March 19). New construction materials (foam core, polyester films stretched over wooden frames) have given the fallero artists flexibility to be ever more absurd, ever more outrageous, and to build up to 10 stories high. In 2010, the largest scene cost about $815,000. It took around a half hour to burn to the ground.
Artistic license runs wild. We encountered an image of President Obama flying through the air as Superman. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi lounged in a hot tub with three cartoonishly buxom women. One ambitious tableau featuring Charlie Chaplin as a mad mechanic managed to skewer European history from the ancient Greeks (a parody of the Olympics) through the Middle Ages (horny Vikings run amok) to a particularly biting portrait of Valencia’s female mayor. Images quickly veered from political to politically incorrect. The falleros are equal opportunity offenders — no one’s sensitivities are spared.
