If something will be remembered about the Fallas 2023, it is how massive they have been. Up to 175,000 people came to witness last Friday, March 17, the mascletà in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, a welfare tension that the local government defends has been managed effectively, but which opens the door to rethinking the party model that Valencia must take into account. the future.
“We have to be serious and objective, where a city doubles its population in five days you run the risk of losing control of the party”, highlighted this morning the Councilor for Citizen Security, Aarón Cano, at the press conference on the balance of failures. Cano has opted to follow the path of decentralizing events -as is done after the pandemic with mascletaes in various neighborhoods of the city-, although he rules out limiting access to the municipal square during the 2:00 p.m. warned this year, more than once, that the capacity was full.
Cano has made a numerical balance of the actions in the field of citizen security, with “figures similar to those of 2019”. However, nothing is comparable to these Fallas, in which the end of the pandemic, the celebration on the weekend and the coincidence with today’s public holiday in the Community of Madrid have dimensioned the attendance.
And at this point, the vice mayor Sandra Gómez, already as a candidate for mayor, has stated that “concentrating the holidays in the week of Fallas should be considered to favor work-life balance”. Given the massive attendance, Gómez points out that “it is normal for more people to gather in the center because it is an open party that we share with everyone.”
For his part, Mayor Joan Ribó has recognized that there has been “overcrowding, but that is not valid for every year”. Ribó has defended that these “have not been normal Fallas, because there have been a series of conditions that have helped to spread them” and he has been generally satisfied with how the Fallas have worked, while criticizing the homophobic aggression against a fallero of the Tomasos fault, “which seems like a savage thing to me”.
“The city has broken its seams with an unremembered number of people; we have seen Xàtiva street collapse in the moments before the mascletá and that shows that many people have come”, explained councilor Aarón Cano. On average, attendance at the mascletaes on March 17, 18 and 19 left between 160,000 and 175,000 people. On March 7, Cano has given data, the square could accommodate some 107,000 people.
They know this in the hotel industry, and they have estimated the total impact of the 2023 Fallas at around 700 million euros, of which some 30 million euros would correspond to income from hotel accommodation. For Hosbec, the hotel occupancy of Fallas 2023 and the Magdalena de Castelló Festival has been very positive: “In both cases it was close to technical full during the two consecutive weekends in which the festivals took place, while that during the week it has oscillated between 80-85%”, they have pointed out. The hotel industry has also billed 10% more than in 2019.
In addition to proposing a new model, as Councilor Cano has repeatedly suggested at the press conference, the Fallas of 2023 also leave reflections and criticisms -especially on social networks- about the dirt of the streets and squares after festivals and mascletaes, mostly.
And although the Department of Urban Ecology will take stock of cleanliness tomorrow, councilor Sergi Campillo has made an assessment after the conclusion of the festivities, assuring that “the city has remained reasonably clean and today, the 20th, it has recovered its normality practically at one hundred by one hundred”.
Campillo has assured that “there are always aspects to improve”, an idea that was already launched this weekend by the mayor Joan Ribó, who acknowledged that it has generated problems in some specific places due to lack of cleanliness or urinals, despite the fact that, according to assured that “a great effort has been made in terms of cleanliness”.
Regarding the urinals, according to Campillo this year there have been 300 in the city, “the year that there have been the most urinals in Fallas”. In addition, to these were added those that the Fallas commissions had in their own demarcation.
Finally, another of the issues to be discussed that Councilor Aarón Cano has raised (who will not revalidate his position in the Valencia City Council with the PSPV) is the sale of alcoholic beverages in stalls throughout the city, of which he has said that ” they are not necessary” because “the hotel industry generates many jobs with the capacity to absorb the demand that exists in the city”.
