🎆Las Fallas (Valencia)

About Las Fallas (Valencia)

Las Fallas is Valencia's most spectacular festival, a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity celebration held in honour of Saint Joseph. Its origins trace to medieval carpenters who burned the wooden planks and rags that propped up their winter lamps as spring arrived. Over the centuries those bonfires grew into the festival's signature artworks: hundreds of towering, satirical sculptures that fill the streets before going up in flames.

The centrepieces are the fallas themselves — elaborate papier-mâché and cardboard monuments, some 20 to 30 metres tall, depicting bawdy and topical scenes that lampoon politicians, celebrities and current events. Each day at 2pm the Plaza del Ayuntamiento shakes with the mascletà, a thunderous, rhythmic barrage of firecrackers, while the city fills with fireworks, parades, paella and the flower offering to the Virgin. Each year one favourite figure, the ninot indultat, is pardoned by public vote and saved from the flames.

The festival builds through early March and peaks on the big days of March 15 to 19, climaxing with La Cremà on the night of March 19 — Saint Joseph's Day — when the monuments are set ablaze in synchronised bonfires across Valencia. Because these dates are fixed each year, the counter above always counts down to the festival. Add Las Fallas to your own page to track the days until Valencia goes up in flames.