Dancing cranes around the city, sleepless nights since the weekend and a lot of work to finish off to raise the Fallas monuments of 2023 to the top. run to celebrate your big party.
Practically since Friday they have been working on the assembly of the monuments, and the artists are busy giving the last touches on the street. Meanwhile, in the casals, falleros and falleras, the details -increasingly numerous- that accompany the monuments are finalized: from the correct position of the lights, to the decorative tents or the details that give more packaging to the monuments.
Today, Wednesday, the city is already waking up with its 380 children’s fallas planted, because at nine in the morning the juries begin to visit them to distribute their prizes. The most discussed, those of the Special Section, where eleven commissions will compete with budgets of more than 20,000 euros in proposals that will talk about toys, municipal markets, diseases or the coronation of the Virgin, always in a children’s key.
With a Valencian theme and with the motto “Easter Day in the Albufera” is the Child’s Indulgence Doll, by Almirante Cadarso-Conde Altea and the work of Enric Ginestar.
With a total of 8,140 votes, the children’s doll of the commission was the winner yesterday, thanks to the total of 43,315 votes cast by the people who visited the 2023 Doll Exhibition. In second place was the Reina-Paz-San Vicente commission , with 5,536 votes, and in third place, that of the Duc de Gaeta-Pobla de Farnals district, with 3,777 votes.
Precisely the boys and girls – already on school holidays until Monday – will go tomorrow, in the first official parade of the Fallas, to collect their banners in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. They continue to work there today to finalize the first municipal falla designed by a woman, the illustrator Marina Puche, created by Manolo García Lleonart. Tonight will be the Plantà, which will be announced to the sky of the city with the show L’Albà de les Falles, at 00:00, by the Hermanos Caballer Pyrotechnics.
These are the Fallas of full normality, but also those of inflation, as the senior teacher of the Guild of Falleros Artists, Paco Pellicer, pointed out yesterday in an interview with EFE, who assured that the price increase has been completely “unforeseen” for the artists, because when the inflation curve shot up they had already started working on the largest monuments.
And although the fallas budgets for this year were already closed, those for the year 2024 are expected to be more contained due to economic uncertainty and the rise in prices than in materials such as wood or polystyrene, both of which are basic in the construction of the fallas. , it’s been duplicated.
However, in the streets of the city the sensation is of full recovery, sponsored by the good weather that directly affects the tourist forecasts. The Valencian hotel association Hosbec counts on touching the technical full in the hotels with occupations that will be at 95%. In fact, he already affirms that during this week, the average occupancy stands at 85%, with the possibility of growing some point with last-minute reservations pushed above all by the good weather and by the Monday holiday, which will bring a good exodus from Madrid to the city.
In fact, Renfe has scheduled the circulation of 27 special Media Distancia trains to travel to Valencia from Thursday to Monday. In fact, given the massive forecast of visitors there will be about 3,500 police officers, in addition to 400 firefighters and a hundred Civil Protection members at the service of locals and visitors.
The internationalization of the festival is palpable and can be seen in tools such as FallasBot, a virtual tourism assistant verified by Meta, the Facebook and Instagram company, which offers visitors and enthusiasts information on the entire Fallas agenda, even on nine languages. So that no one misses a detail.
