Palau de la Mar, Valencia, 18th March 2009
We did not need to set that alarm for last night’s firework display –we lay listening to it rending the sky like too-close thunder!
Down to a bustling breakfast room soon after nine o’clock – more people have arrived for the Ofranda de Flores, the most important parade of the festival that will attract over 100,000 people.
After breakfast walked in the spring sun past outrageously satirical, scurrilous and sometimes lewd fallas, or ninots, to the charming circular Plaza Redonda. Built by Salvador Escrig Melchor in 1840, it is known locally at ‘el clot’ (the hole) and has a central fountain surrounded by simple stalls selling anything from crafts to plants and ‘antiques’ to household essentials. If the air is slightly scruffy and casual, it is not necessarily the worse for that, it has character and the feel of being rooted in history and the community. Builders were at work on it and I hoped that it was not going to be sanitized into a collection of bijou boutiques. The charm of its everydayness was emphasized by contrast with the beautiful, graceful eighteenth century Baroque tower of Santa Catalina that overlooks it.
At the Plaza de la Virgin, by the Basilica of the Virgen of the Defenseless, a fourteen-metre high figure of the Virgin was being dressed in a gown of white flowers with red and yellow applique floral decorations. We sat on Plaza de le Reina eating croquetas de jamon and churros watching the parade stream by; families, people of all ages, in traditional peacock finery, the women and girls seeming to float on the long billowing skirts of richly embroidered dresses. In their arms some of the 40,000 bunches of flowers that will make the Virgin’s dress and decorate the face of the Basilica.
The parade was still flowing through the darkened streets at eleven o’clock; fireworks again blazed in the sky over the hotel at half-past-one.