Las Faellas and Gandia beach

Well, the matts and I decided to go to las Faellas and stay in Gandia for the weekend, but let’s back up. Due to ‘holiday’ bus complications for Thursday (Spain’s father’s day), we stayed in Madrid on wed night and took a bus to Valencia for las Faellas, one of Spain’s biggest festivals (weeklong, that ends in the burning of Las Faellas). The main attractive at Las Faellas are these giant paper mache creations, many of them poke at and play with political and cultural themes, very whimsical. We arrived to hear an outstanding fireworks ensemble that sounded like a preview of the end of the world; it was booming! Anyway, the streets were packed way beyond fire code (if there was such a thing…I could be way off, but I would have guessed there were 100 thousand people there). At one point I lifted my backpack for extra space and lost it instantaneously. I think crowd surfing would have been a better way to get around than trying to squeeze through. Poor claustrophobians who can’t participate in the madness.


Alright so after world war 3, we took a bus to the hotel to drop off our stuff. Matt and I went to see the Science Museum, not the inside though, just the architecture. It was built by the same architect that made the Sydney Opera house. Gorgeous, I’ve noticed a lot of mosaic tiling in Spain and it was a nice touch.







We made our way back to see Las Faellas before they reached their destiny forged in the fires of eternal damnation. Epic right? Well, I enjoyed seeing these things. People spend the entire year making them to watch them all burn…that’s culture. At 7, we watched a parade of dancing devils and traditional (barbarian) music…mainly drums. It was entertaining to see the storm of fire in the streets. We talked to a local that said Las Faellas have been around for 1800 years; kinda doubt it but that’s pretty old.







After the parade, we searched for our trusty kebab shop, one of our favorite foods on this trip. The night ensued and we went to (second) dinner with some Californians we met for paella and Sangria. Paella, if not familiar with an earlier post, is a traditional Spanish cuisine (originally from Valencia) with saffron rice (tastes like mac and cheese) and an array of fish like shrimp, calamari, mussels..ect. After dinner, we wanted to get to the big faellas to see the burning at 12. A long walk of following the Californians let us astray. They headed off ahead while me and Matt, the men, used our directional and intuitive spacial senses and decided to walk in the opposite direction from them: of course we were right and ran into our destination. Since the faellas are spread out in many intersections, we couldn’t see them all, but we got to see a couple of them burn. We even danced around a burnt faella with a group of kids and adults holding hands chanting a song that ended in “jodate” (look it up if you want the definition). Around 12:45 we followed the crowd and saw more fireworks and one of the bigger faellas burn to the ground. We decided to make the long walk back to the hotel but got to see one last faella before we went to bed. Well, that was Thursday.


Friday, we went to the beach in Valencia and had a picnic with the other girls who came down. We went to Gandia on a 5:15 train and checked into our hotel at 6:30. We lucked out with a view from the 11th floor of the Mediterranean that was about 2 blocks away. We hung out, got some food at the grocery store, wanted to go out, but fell asleep by 10:30. Since Spaniards don’t even go to the bars until 1, it was probably a good idea to caught up on sleep and conserve our energy for Saturday night. Saturday was drab weather, mostly overcast, but we made the most of it to say the least. We sat in the hot tub for a good chunk of the day, walked by the beach when the sun came out and went to the bars around 12 at night. We went to a locally famous club called Cocoloco (crazy coconut) and left when the sun was coming up over the Mediterranean. Sunday, we finally went to the beach with the sun, but it was short lived with a full day of travel in front of us. Even though we haphazardly managed to get from bus (10 min) to train (1 hour) to bus (4.25 hours) to metro (25 min) to bus (1.25 hour) like clockwork, we didn’t get back to Segovia until 10:15 at night. It was a great time and I’m definetly glad I got experience las faellas and the beach. I even came back with a little sun.


David