By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer)
Spain and fiestas go hand in hand, like jamón, paella, and sangría in the sun-soaked dreams of travelers the world over.
Hemingway started that dream. His first novel, Fiesta (published as The Sun Also Rises in the U.S.), burned the image into the world’s mind: bulls thundering through narrow alleys, chasing drunk Americans as they slipped and stumbled over Pamplona’s cobblestones.
But fiestas in Spain aren’t made for tourists. They never were.
Fiestas are rituals. Ancient ones. Older than the Romans. Older than the Moors. Older even than the Iberians. They rise from the mists of time.
The bull was a god. It stood for strength and for the raw energy of the earth. In the caves of Altamira, not far from Pamplona, Paleolithic artists painted them 14000 years ago, in ochre and black, like a prehistoric Sistine Chapel.
Fiestas in Spain belong to the people. To the villages and towns. To their saints and neighborhoods. They’re not performances for the tourists. They’re promises kept from one generation to the next.
Hemingway sold the dream of the Spanish fiesta. A romantic blur of bull horns and broken bones, of wine-fueled debates in sunlit cafés. That vision drew waves of Americans, Brits, Germans, and other guiris chasing the myth of the “real Spain.”
But here’s the truth: fiestas aren’t for the guiris.
The rest of us are just passing through. Visitors. Welcome, maybe. But only as witnesses.
Behind every bull run, every tomato fight, every burning effigy set ablaze just steps from homes and schools during Fallas, there’s something deeper. There’s faith.
Spanish fiestas carry a religious raison d’être. Catholic in name but with a pagan heart. The Fallas of Valencia are a perfect example.
Valencian Fallas: A Night Of Fire
Tourists cheer as giant ninots burn at midnight at the climax of the Valencian Fallas fiestas. But few know the ritual began hours earlier, weeks even, in pre-dawn masses in local churches and in grand cathedrals, where the Falleras, those girls in embroidered silk and lace, wear their hair in coiled buns, which are practically identical to those worn by ancient Iberian women, like the Lady of Elche, carved in stone in the 4th century B.C. Her limestone gaze and Princess Leia buns look just like a Fallera getting ready for the night of fire.
What looks like spectacle is, in truth, memory. Inherited. Held close. Passed down.
That doesn’t mean all locals love the fiestas.
Some say they’re too loud. That they drag on. That they bring in too many drunks.
And they’re not wrong.
Tourists often add fuel to the chaos. But not always.
Take Las Fallas, for example. What most visitors see as a wild, one-night blowout of fire and fireworks, preceded by a few days of snapping selfies with satirical papier-mâché giants, is, in truth, a year-long ritual.
Local falleros take it seriously. Each Falla group belongs to a neighborhood. Most come from working-class roots. They build, they organize, they raise funds, they gather. They do this all year.
But not everyone is a fan, especially not in the gentrified districts.
There, new apartment owners complain. About the noise. The fire risk. The never-ending street gatherings. The paella feasts that spill onto the sidewalks. The late-night music. The wine. The laughter.
There’s a class divide here. And a cultural one, too.
Many of those new apartment owners are guiris. Foreigners. Outsiders. And their discomfort with the traditions only widens the gap.
To some, Fallas is noise and nuisance. To others, it’s identity. History. Belonging.
And that tension crackles in the air, just like the fireworks.
First Fallas
My first encounter with Las Fallas came years ago, during my first trip to mainland Spain.
I had flown in from New York to Madrid. Did the classics, El Prado, Plaza Mayor, bocadillos, and red wine lunch at Museo del Jamón.
Then I took the train to Cuenca, wanting to see the famous hanging houses.
It was in Cuenca, in a crusty tasca full of old men, that I first heard the word, Fallas.
The tabernero poured another glass and said, almost in passing, that last night had been the Nit del Foc (the Night of Fire) down in Valencia. It was the night signaling the beginning of the end of the Fallas festival. That very night, the tavern keeper said they would burn everything down in Valencia.
I dimly remembered reading something about the Fallas in an old National Geographic. Photos of towering paper figures, wild colors, strange faces.
But I had never imagined them in person. They seemed like something out of a dream. Disney on acid. Massive cartoon gods rising up across a whole city, only to be set ablaze in a final act of fire and fireworks. A cleansing.
And the language. That caught me off guard, too.
Valencia, it turns out, had its own tongue. Not a dialect. A language. Most first-time visitors to Spain don’t know this. They think Spain is all flamenco, Spanish and olé, “Que Viva España” and all that. They don’t know it’s really a mosaic: Galician in the northwest. Basque in the northeast. Catalan in the east. And in Valencia, a version of Catalan of its own.
I didn’t understand much then. But I felt it. A pulse. Something old and alive. So off I went down to the train station to catch the last train heading to Valencia that day.
My Night of Fire
Nothing could have prepared me for the wild energy that greeted me when I stepped off the train in Valencia.
The air crackled. The crowds were everywhere. People camped out on sidewalks around the station. There was no room at the inns.
This was 1998. Back when young travelers carried Lonely Planet guides in their backpacks and used coins to call pensiones from train station pay phones.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep, not with fireworks overhead and loud crowds marching down the avenues.
Every intersection held a monument. Not of stone but paper, paint, and genius. Roman gods. Politicians. Cartoon parrots. Kings. Queens. All absurd. All beautiful. All built for the flames.
At midnight, the city ignited.
Bonfires flared. Streets overflowed. I let the river of people carry me down toward the Ayuntamiento. In front of the city hall stood a winged Roman goddess, half greek, half angel, waiting for her final hour.
Loudspeakers crackled with speeches in a language I’d never heard before. Familiar, but not quite Spanish. Valencian. The crowd shouted. Waved flags. Red and yellow stripes and medieval jewels. A language. A people. A city of fire.
Then it happened.
The sky exploded white. A volley of fireworks thundered at once. And the winged goddess burst into flames.
It was four in the morning by the time I found a stall selling churros and chocolate. The chocolate was thick enough to hold the churro upright. Hot, oily, sweet. Perfect.
I wandered the streets as the sun came up.
The crowds had thinned. Firemen doused the last embers. Street sweepers swept up the ashes with clockwork precision.
By noon, it would all be gone, every monument, every spark erased as if nothing had happened. Except for the hangovers. And the memories.
Back in New York later that year, I learned that Valencia had a beach. I’d missed it. And I was gutted.
I kept thinking how perfect it would’ve been to watch the sunrise from the edge of the Mediterranean. Feet in the warm surf. My mind still reeling from the night before. Smoke and fire, music and wine. A whole city burned and reborn.
Then I remembered someone else had missed the beach, too.
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of Hemingway’s characters had gone to Valencia and never saw the sea. He was scolded for it by Pilar, the sharp-tongued partisan woman, who snapped: “In Valencia there was movement all day and all night.”
She was right. And I knew exactly what she meant.
I never got to see that sunrise on the beach.
But maybe that’s the whole point of Fallas. You don’t get to keep anything. Not the fire. Not the laughter. Not the giant papier-mâché goddess who looked like she could fly. You dance all night beside her, cheer as she burns, and by morning, she’s gone, swept away with the ashes and the empty wine bottles.
All that’s left is the smoke in your clothes, the ringing in your ears, and a vague sense that something wild and beautiful just passed through you.
In Valencia, they build miracles to burn them. Every year. On purpose.
And maybe that’s not madness. Maybe that’s wisdom.
Because in the end, everything burns. Might as well enjoy the fireworks.
The Night of Fire
A Beat Poem by Max Milano
Burn to live, built to burn.
Your Fallas live on and on,
for the people, for the saints,
for the neighborhood,
for the pain
that the floods came here to make.
Wide awake all through all the night,
Banging drums as fireworks fly
Your paellas cook in tents,
and your flags do represent
the old kings that came and went.
But your soul has stayed and prayed
to the virgins of the old,
whom the Romans once foresaw.
On the Med you once were set,
but of kingdoms came upset.
Not tonight — the Nit del Foc —
where the fires are well fought,
and the churros served up hot.
All the night you sing your songs
of the kings of the French march,
who changed thrones to claim the land,
that your fires now purify,
with your Fallas through the night.
Stay tuned to GuiriGuru for more Spain explorations and expat tips.
Max Milano is a travel writer and photographer based in Los Angeles, California, and Valencia, Spain. His latest photography book, Mexico City Noir, Life Under The Volcanoes, is Available on Amazon. His photographs are available at MaxMilanoPix.
