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Hemingway Adventure
Valencia, Spain (third day)
Five minutes to midnight in a small square in the heart of the old city. There isn't room for that many people and those that are here are mainly local. They're gathered around a tall, Disneyesque Aladdin, centrepiece of an Arabian Nights fantasy with prominent local politicians, nuns, and a bishop or two thrown in for good measure. It's an elaborate and clever piece of work and those who created it are now busy making sure that they can destroy it just as cleverly. They move around the base of the figure poking an air-hole through here, laying a fuse there. One man is up a ladder at the back of the statue, sticking wires and paraffin bags up Aladdin's backside. The mood is serious and celebratory at the same time. I have the feeling that the general success of Fallas is considered more important than any single event. The groups compete with each other but only to make the whole festival better. Which is why this festival has been marked by high spirits without violence, drinking without fighting, noise without aggression. And tonight is perhaps the most precarious balancing act of all. Seven hundred bonfires are about to be lit across an urban area of a million people.
At midnight in our quiet square the local queen of the Fallas lights the fuse that starts the last act of this extraordinary festival. Lines of firecrackers and flame race towards Aladdin's buttocks and other strategic flashpoints. For a while the figures prove resistant but gradually the flames take hold and the figures are stripped to their wooden frames and for a half-minute or more the surge of the fire is frighteningly intense.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Hemingway Adventure
- Chapter: Valencia, Spain (third day)
- Country/sea: Spain
- Place: Valencia
- Book page no: 128
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