Tag: beach

Holidays / Valencia

Bonfires on the beach in Nules

As we work on updating our blog this cold, rainy winter evening in Madrid, we longingly remember watching Midsummer bonfires on a Valencian beach last June. Our dear friends from Vila-Real invited us to mark Saint John’s Day in the most Valencian way possible: FIRE!!! The Hogueras de San Juan (Fogueres de Sant Joan in Valencian) are bonfires, frequently set along a beach. The bonfires, which are lit around the time of the summer solstice, were originally meant to keep evil spirits away. People traditionally build the fires with old furniture and other wood. Revelers typically feed themselves in addition to feeding

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Burriana / Strolling / Valencia

Mom visits our Mediterranean home

In addition to our trip to Tarragona, mom’s early summer visit included plenty of beach time, trips into the city, and paella. Mom accompanied Dreamer to the nearby city of Vila-real to discount shop at the local football club’s end-of-season sale. After buying a bright yellow scarf, the ladies casually strolled through downtown, where they came across an 18th-century villa with some special inhabitants. Dreamer was thrilled to discover four gigantes, or giant people, in the courtyard of the villa. Built by the family of the man who introduced and promoted the cultivation of mandarin oranges in the region, the Casa

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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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