Search Results for: parade

Burriana / Las Fallas

Losing Ninot or: burn, falla, burn

And so, our Fallas coverage draws to a dramatic end. All of the parades, fireworks, and other events in our city and in the capital, Valencia, led up to this final moment in the life of any of the enormous monuments: the burning, also known as La Cremà (quema in Spanish). We came home to Burriana Sunday, March 19, after a brief visit to Castellón to see the Magdalena celebration, only to encounter a smoldering pile of rubble in the street where one of the children’s fallas had stood before we left town. And down the road, smoke in the sky indicated there was more

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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 / Strolling

Finding Ninot: All aboard the Burriana Fallas Train!

Choo, choo! The fallas train is about to depart and take you all around our town’s different displays! Our small city featured a surprising number of fallas during their namesake festival this March. Yes, there was a real “train” that drove through the streets, taking passengers past each one. And yes, we did wait in line for an hour and a half to ride it. Before we get to the train, let’s take a look at what got us to this point: fallas, you’ll remember, are grand artistic monuments constructed in different cities and towns around the Valencian Community and displayed during the weeklong celebration, at the

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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 / Tourism / Valencia

Where good Banjo Boys and Girls come from

We spent the first weekend of March doing some fun activities at home, too, and we managed to stayed just as busy as our previous weekend at home. This time around, we filled our days and nights with a quirky museum, a spa, a parade, rice, pyrotechnics, porcelain figurines, and horchata (sounds like a lot, but to be fair, our weekends are three days – yes, our life is rough).   Saturday: Spa, playing card museum, and a surprise parade Playing card games are quite possibly an even more popular pastime in Spain than in America, and that’s saying something because we

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