The Fallas of València face their final stretch with a human tide that, taking advantage of the good weather, walks throughout the city visiting the monuments that will burn this Tuesday in the Cremà, the final touch of fire that will welcome spring after some festivities that This year they will leave record numbers.
This Monday, the constant noise of firecrackers and fireworks merges with the music of the bands that accompany the Fallas commissions that parade from each neighborhood towards the center in a continuous festive parade, immortalized by cell phones and cameras of thousands of tourists who continue to be amazed. of the attractiveness of this festival that is not only Intangible Heritage of Humanity, but also the one that generates the most economic return and employment of those celebrated in Spain.
In the afternoon, from 3:30 p.m. until well into the early hours of the morning – when the Fallera Mayor, María Estela Arlandis, enters the Plaza de la Virgen -, the second day of the Floral Offering to the Virgen de los Desamparados, the most devout and multitudinous act of the Fallas but this year will also foreseeably break another record.
According to local media estimates that the Central Fallera Board has not yet confirmed but does advance that they will be record-breaking, the first day would have brought together – in a non-stop and excited parade that ended around three in the morning – some 60,000 falleras and falleros, so this year’s total number could exceed that of 2023 by 17,000 people.
The design of this year’s enormous floral mantle on which rests the bust of the woman affectionately known as “Geperudeta” with the baby Jesus alludes to what is known as the Apostles’ Door of the Cathedral, another enclave through which thousands of people pass this Monday. visitors because it is located in the historic center of the city.
Likewise, everything is now ready for one of the most anticipated pyrotechnic shows, the Nit del Foc: the Caballer FX pyrotechnics of Moncada (Valencia) will illuminate the sky of the city starting this midnight and for about twenty minutes with about a ton and medium of pyrotechnic material.
The show designed by María José Lora, owner of the historic pyrotechnic firm and heir to one of the most important dynasties in the sector, has been baptized ‘Ràfegues al firmament’ and will include material designed expressly for the occasion, all near the City of Arts and Sciences although it will be visible from the entire city.
More than 6,500 artifice units controlled by some 2,500 fire commands are expected to explode in the sky, guaranteeing intensity and color, according to their creators.
The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is expected to contemplate it from the nearby Palau de les Arts, just as he has also been able to enjoy the mascletà at two in the afternoon from the balcony of the City Hall alongside the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, and the mayor of the city, María José Catalá.
The mascletà this Monday, the eve of Saint Joseph, has been a spectacle “to the taste of Valencians”, deafening and that has made the crowded Town Hall square resound in its “infinite” final part, as described by the young pyrotechnician (of 20 years old) designer of the show, Manolo Crespo Rey.
The gunpowder smoke has flooded the square and the sky like a cloudy day with heavy rain does, after some initial whistles in a classic start impregnated with Valencian fireworks that have offered a “Valencian spectacle”, “an outrage”, in the words of a pyrotechnician who, despite his youth, has already fired three mascletaes at the “kilometer zero” of the Fallas and “cathedral of gunpowder” for the sector and the fans.
In that same square, the four ninots that represent sub-Saharan immigrants are still perched on the perimeter fence of the mascletà on a fence that could be that of Melilla and for which the person responsible for this year’s municipal failure – that of the two giant pigeons who are vying for an olive branch -, the urban artist Escif, has had to come forward to reaffirm the critical meaning of that installation, which symbolizes for him one of the contradictions of today’s society.
And he has done so in the face of accusations of taking advantage of the visibility of the municipal falla – out of competition but, each year, one of the most visited as it is in the City Hall square – to make a spectacle of “institutional racism”, as he had previously denounced the Dissident Migrant Resistance collective.
Meanwhile, the dozens of thousands of visitors who flood Valencia – there are still no definitive figures but the hotel and tourism forecasts already glimpsed record-breaking Fallas – continue to relentlessly visit the nearly 700 Fallas, both large and children’s, spread throughout each neighborhood. before, starting at 8 pm on Tuesday, they are reduced to ashes during the Cremà.
The first to burn will be the children’s ones, at 8:30 p.m. the winner of this year’s “little ones” (Jerusalem Convent) will do so and half an hour later, the municipal children’s one.
At 10 p.m. the fire ritual for the big ones will begin, half an hour before that for the first prize of the Special Section, the allegory to climate change proposed by l’Antiga de Campanar (in the neighborhood where on February 22 the fire of a residential block left ten dead and hundreds homeless).
And at eleven at night it will be the turn for the municipal falla, after which the official closure will be put on the Fallas 2024 and the enormous work of leaving the city ready and clean will begin after five big and official days of celebration, although this has conditioned the entire city for several weeks before.
