Search Results for: burriana

Burriana / Las Fallas / Valencia

For foc’s sake: what is a mascletà?

Valencians love their fireworks. The community is Spain’s leading producer of fireworks, in fact. Rare is the night when we’re lying in bed and don’t hear some random pops or booms coming from another part of the city… or even right next door. We do live directly above a local falla, after all. For the Fallas celebration here, it should come as no surprise, then, that fireworks factor in heavily. Everyone participates, starting at a young age. A really young age. Because we don’t live in the capital city, we didn’t witness the daily wake-up call known as la Despertà, in which parades of people

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Las Fallas / Valencia

Finding Ninot: Valencia proper

If Burriana offers a more comfortable, familiar Fallas experience, then the capital city, Valencia, provides large-scale wonder. Dreamer’s first visit to Valencia during the festival week with Dad and Deb (poor Doer had to work!) revealed a city completely metamorphosed into a monument to celebration. Little mojito huts had sprung up out of nowhere. We did manage to find one area that wasn’t completely overtaken by Fallas: City of Arts and Sciences, the iconic cultural complex designed by Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava. Still, you couldn’t go far without running into a monument or a parade. When it was time for our visitors to return

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Burriana / Las Fallas / Valencia

Finding Ninot: Flowers and parades

Many parades accompany the Fallas celebration, both formal and impromptu. Sometimes it seems like you can’t go anywhere in the city of Valencia during Fallas week without running into a panoply of costumed marchers and musicians. Each individual march doesn’t always seem to be a big deal for the participants. Really, sometimes people just seem to be getting from Point A to Point B, like anyone using the road. There was no escaping it. The festive fanfare was never far away, and it frequently interrupted us during our Valencian walking tour, while we were trying to take a break from las Fallas.

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Burriana / Restaurants

The Fallas are coming!

After visiting the quintessential Spanish city, we returned to Burriana with Dad and Deb to find a lot had changed, starting with the enormous falla that had materialized outside our apartment building during our four-day absence. We will finally get to the Fallas in our next several blog posts, we promise. While the festival did take up a lot of our time during Dad and Deb’s visit to the Valencian Community, we did manage to show them a few non-Fallas highlights in Burriana, so we wanted to get that out of the way here first. Although Burriana is a seaside community, we

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Castellón / Cooking / Food / Tourism

Onda: Castle, ceramics, and paella

We managed to fit another castle into our schedule last month during an overcast weekend spent recovering near home after our epic trip to Copenhagen. We also visited a ceramics museum and Doer learned some new techniques for making paella – but first, the castle! Onda’s castle once was known as the Castle of 300 Towers, and according to Guía Total de la Comunidad Valenciana (our resident guidebook of the Valencian Community), these towers allowed Muslims in Onda to resist King James I the Conqueror for years, even after the nearby city of Burriana, where we live, was taken in 1233. The Moors built

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Burriana

When it rains, it pours: Flooding in the Valencian Community

Doer and I have been enjoying the winter weather in the Valencian Community. Even on the coldest days, it usually reaches 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or it gets pretty darn close (this doesn’t prevent locals from asking us how we can possibly go about with short sleeves and no coats – but that’s a different blog post). It doesn’t even rain that often here – but when it does, it can become downright torrential. After an especially rainy weekend near the end of January, I rode my bike to one of my favorite places in Burriana – the Clot, a little park

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