On that March 10 three years ago, the sorrowful faces of the Valencian rulers did not bode well. Salvador Enguix told it in an accurate and meticulous account of that night when President Ximo Puig announced the postponement of the Fallas (for the sixth time in its history) and the Magdalena Festival from the Palau de la Generalitat. Enguix wrote that this was “the expression of the most difficult and saddest moment of this left-wing regional executive”.
Later, it is true, many more came. But nobody knew that. That fateful March the city left hundreds of Senyeres hanging in its streets, an evident sign that the Fallas festival was already ready to be celebrated. That postponement lasted a long time: the flags ended up hanging through the air in a particularly rainy spring that gave way to an endless number of scenarios that nobody presumed, such as that of the Cremà almost stealthily from the base of the meditator, the municipal failure of 2020 which is already a symbol of that time. The motto, “Açò també passarà”, seemed like a bad omen.
During this time, the commissions were looking for formulas to avoid losing the census or activity, but not all of them were successful. Some ignored the September celebration to reach March 2022 with a better budget and even with the monument to burn; Others scrutinized the DOGV every day with the new restrictions to see what could and could not be done in the Fallas house.
The Monitoring Committee of the party fought hard to get a party in which not a few participated that hot September. They were some decaffeinated Fallas that were organized with great delicacy to keep distances, respect the so-called ‘bubble groups’ and that without a festival program, an anomaly that sounds far away but that allowed us to recover part of the spirit that has been lying down since 2019.
Now, three years later, the party is finally facing its normality. The metro crowded with people without masks these days to go to the Fallas concerts or the massive mascletaes every noon are good examples. Crowds, that great risk to avoid during Covid-19, are part of the spirit of Las Fallas.
This Monday begins the final week for the party, and there are some reflections on the table. The pandemic, and now the war, has also taken its toll, although they are less visible. How inflation and the economic crisis will affect the fallas artists, a singular guild that only works in the Valencian Community and that also suffers from the increase in the cost of raw materials and energy costs. In what way will the failing commissions face the future, when they also assume increasingly higher bills.
There is also ambition to take advantage of a time called normal. In the Ruzafa neighborhood, for example, where fallas occur at every corner, they hope to recover this week everything lost in previous years. It is the hope of a sector whose annual turnover is highly conditioned by the party.
The truth is that since 2020 and up to now there have also been many people who have left the institutional party and who have been returning little by little in these years. However, now yes, the Fallas census has already managed to exceed the figures of the extraordinary Fallas of September 2021 and the ordinary ones of March 2022, with a total of 103,317 registered in the city as of this past March 1, compared to 93,464 last year.
Just before the Covid there were 99,756 falleros and this 2023 the figure of 100,000 falleros and falleras has again been exceeded, which represents almost 13% of the population of the capital.
Likewise, evaluating the economic impact of the festival is the pending task that, three years later, the Valencia City Council is already carrying out. These days there will be pollsters in the city center to collect data on local, national and foreign tourism, the commissions must fill out surveys and the authorities collaborate in providing their spending figures.
It is expected to know the economic impact at the end of the year, when the exhaustive analysis carried out by the MESVAL Chair of the University of Valencia and technicians from the Ivie is finished, and which will allow us to understand what that sad and pandemic time meant in numbers, not in feelings and so empty of ninots.
