Weekend in Valencia

It was a slow weekend, at least for us.

We walked to Russafa market on Saturday and bought potatoes and tea. Very exciting. And then walked back through the crowds streaming away from City Hall Square after the mascletas. It’s astonishing to us how many people come down for this show – and it only lasts six minutes! Then you see this happy, chattering river of humanity flowing from the centre, snarling traffic. And it happens every day at 2 p.m. during Fallas time.

Mascleta crowd flowing away from centre past bullring

The churro stands that we saw going up on Friday, were all open for business on Saturday, especially around the train station and surrounding streets, where there are several.

Churro stand near train station: yum!

The other big Fallas-related event on Saturday was the Cavalcade of the Ninots, a parade through the centre in which all the community groups march, sometimes in costume, carry banners and pull floats illustrating the themes of their Fallas installations. It goes on much of the day. When we went with Ralph in 2012, we found it underwhelming. The streets were lined three or four deep with excited onlookers, but to us, the floats and marching groups looked uninspired and bedraggled. So we took a pass this time, which turned out to be a big mistake.

The parade goes on much of the day and into the evening. According to one website we consulted for Fallas scheduling information, the day would end with a big fireworks display in City Hall Square, at midnight. Karen and I had gone to this show the last time we were here and it was a big deal. The square was jammed with people standing shoulder to shoulder, long before the fireworks started. A festive, happy crowd – Valencianos seem to love gathering together for communal events. There was an elaborate light and projection show on the buildings around the square while we waited, and when the fireworks came, they were spectacular, and long lasting.  We planned to go this year, and rested all afternoon and evening so we’d be fit for a rare late night out. Karen was particularly looking forward to it.

A little after 9:30, though, we heard the sound of fireworks coming from the direction of City Hall and, looking out our windows, saw a few rockets going up, just barely clearing the tops of the buildings on our street and Guillem de Castro. They lasted less than ten minutes, possibly less than five, and were over. Oh-oh! Was that our fireworks show? We went back to the Internet and found another site with Fallas scheduling info. This one contradicted the first, suggesting the fireworks would go whenever the parade and other ceremonies ended.  

Crap! We’d missed them.

We still hoped there was some mistake and that this was some other display – possibly an early show for the kiddies? We went out about 11, just in case a crowd was forming at the square. But it was pretty evident everything was over for the day. There were no people heading towards the centre along our street or on Castro as we would have expected. When we got to City Hall, the lights were all on. There were stragglers hanging about, but the workmen were out cleaning up and dismantling the reviewing stand. You could see the shreds of exploded fireworks hanging from the wires in the cage in the middle of the square where they set them off. Confirmed: we’d missed it.

We did a circumnavigation of the square and then walked home through Chinatown. Lots of bright lights still on at some squares and intersections, and the churro stands were lit up festively, but we even saw some of them closing for the night. On Saturday! Before midnight!

Churro stand on St. Vincent Martir, a couple of blocks from our apartment

This is confirming to us that, alas, Valencianos have realized they can’t afford the kind of extravagant celebrations of years past. We had noticed what appeared to be a different kind of Fallas statue erected in City Hall Square: low, constructed of wooden slats, abstract. It's possibly an allusion to the original meaning of Fallas, which involved burning of scrap wood from carpenters' shops in the spring (according to some accounts). It’s not an unattractive piece, but a far cry from the fabulous and massive – storeys high – tableau that had pride of place in City Hall Square the last time we were here. It remains to be seen if this modest wooden structure is the only thing that will be planted here. But the one we saw in 2012 took days to erect in the lead-up to Fallas week, so we’re not hopeful.

City Hall Square fallas we saw in 2012

On Sunday, we walked over to IVAM, the modern art museum, to see if there was anything else on there we might enjoy. We walked through the centre and when we came out at a square across from the Turia Gardens, we saw our first big Fallas statue. It was all in pieces and heavily wrapped in plastic so you could hardly see what the figures were. But at least it’s a sign that some of the community groups and/or sponsors are still spending big bucks for splashy sculptures. Woohoo!

Street art in Carmen by Cere, spotted on walk to IVAM

We looked at two of the exhibits at IVAM: the long-running show of highlights from the museum’s holdings of work by the early-20th century Spanish sculptor, Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942); and one of photographs by the mid-century Bauhaus-trained German-Argentine photographer, Grete Stern.

Early-career bronze mask by Julio Gonzales at IVAM

Gonzalez may be important in the history of Spanish art. Certainly IVAM has staked a lot on his importance. It invested heavily in his work at the time the museum was being founded in the late 1980s, and received a large bequest from a collector. His work apparently forms the core of the permanent collection. Hence this exhibit – possibly another sign of belt-tightening at public institutions: traveling exhibits cost a lot, putting up pieces from your warehouse, not so much. The work is typical of the period and some of it is quite attractive and interesting, but it doesn’t seem to me, on the basis of what’s here, that Gonzalez was of the first rank.

'Dream No. 1: Electrical household goods' (1950) by Grete Stern at IVAM

Stern, to me at least, was more interesting. She did a lot of different things in photography, including commercial work. But she’s best known for the composite photographs she started making in Argentina when she was living there after escaping from Europe before the war. She was apparently heavily influened by Freudian psychotherapy, and feminism. The main body of work here is a long series of photographs called “Dreams.” They piece together backgrounds, props and figures – almost always women, dressed very conventionally – and illustrate both Freudian ideas about the unconscious and ideas about the role of women, and the need for artists like Grete to break free from the restraints of those roles. I was interested in the techniques involved in these early examples of photo-composite work, an art form that has become much more sophisticated in the age of Photoshop.

Redbuds and bougainvillea near Botanical Gardens

We walked home via the botanical gardens and a nice little park across from the Turia Gardens that we remembered from one of our earlier stays in Valencia. It has some slightly hideous modern sculptures but also lovely flower beds, including huge climbing bougainvillea, and a wall of what Karen believes is elaborately espaliered orange trees. In a passageway to a church just outside the garden walls, we spotted some of the now ubiquitous green parrots – we saw them once in 2012, now they’re everywhere – eating blossoms from the redbud trees. I tried to photograph them, of course, but the little bastards wouldn’t pose properly. Birds!

Street art in parking lot near Botanical Gardens

A little further on, we stumbled on this street art, which appeared to be photos of paintings done elsewhere and plastered on the walls like bills - not the most popular way of doing street art, but you do see it in Valencia. The images are the shrouded figures of dead children, possibly war dead – you can see smudges of blood. Or drowned refugees? The juxtaposition with shiny automobiles seems ironic, possibly deliberately so.

And so home on that cheery note.