Letter from Valencia by Benjamin Curtis

"In Valencia we are quieter, more tranquil than the people in Madrid" said the taxi driver who was taking me from the city centre to the beach. "Do you know Las Fallas?" he asked. I told him that indeed I did, and came down from the capital every year to enjoy the festivities. "Las Fallas", he added with a wicked look in his eye, "are tremendous!" Indeed they are, and about as far from quiet and tranquil as one could possibly hope to get.

This week-long gunpowder-fest, which ends in a blaze of city-wide fires on March the 19th every year, provides a poignant reminder of just why it's so wonderful to be British in Spain: "That would never be allowed at home" is a phrase that constantly springs to mind, and never more so than in Valencia throughout the middle of March. The Valencians, you see, have a terrible vice: their insatiable appetite for fireworks, explosions, and noise.

The city beach is a curious expanse of sand, twenty minutes from the centre and backed by some of the most dilapidated buildings on the east coast of Spain. It is utterly unappealing to lie on because the fine grey sand is whipped up by the slightest of winds and, besides, it isn't very nice to look at. I decided to walk along it instead, towards the distant apartment blocks that mark a point on the horizon where the inland mountains meet the sea.

I came across a roped off area the size of a football pitch; crowds were beginning to gather, two policemen were doing circuits of the perimeter on quad bikes (what a beat!), men and women in hard hats were wandering back and forth. Right in the middle, at the shore's edge, were some barrels dug into the sand. It turned out that there was to be a Mascleta at five o'clock: I'd never seen one at the beach!

At two minutes to five the crowd started to whistle; a sort of adrenalin haze rose in the heat and my heart beat unusually fast. At five on the dot, policemen and hard hats safely out of the way, the first rocket shot into the sky - "Boom!" - the enormous explosion echoed violently off some buildings far behind. The Mascleta had begun.

Up went a firework the size of a cardboard box, lumbering into the air before bursting into a host of smaller containers, that in turn ripped at the sky with bursts of ear splitting sound. Sometimes there were colours (Mascletas are really about sound) and at one point, much to everyone's delight, a Valencian flag sprang from a puff of smoke and parachuted gently into the sea. Some rockets produced a noise like static electricity, burning up in your ears, others scratched at the air like cats' claws on glass.

The orchestrator of these events is revered as an artist, the benign creator of a symphony of sound: it is in the final movement, the 'terremoto' or 'earthquake' stage, where he really shows what he's made of, hurling as much gunpowder as he can afford into the sky for the final few minutes. The beach trembled, the air in my lungs vibrated, even the sunlight seemed to shake: just when I thought like my eardrums were set to collapse, it ended.

After our 'composer' had done his lap of honour, to ripples of contented applause, I headed back to the centre on one of the new trams. Valencia is a city of opposites. Sitting on this ultra-modern version of one the oldest forms of public transport, you are taken through some decidedly rough-looking neighbourhoods: drugs thrive here but the police claim that they don't have the resources to stop them - too busy on those quad bikes perhaps. When these shanty suburbs disappear, allotments spring out of the ground, and for a while the city almost disappears.

Back in the centre the contrast continues. Frighteningly dilapidated buildings in various states of disintegration lie just around the corner from the smart facades of the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Valencia's main square. This is the site of the biggest Mascletas in town - the first few Sundays of March, and every day for a week up to the nineteenth, see upwards of ten thousand people gathering at two o'clock to have their senses shaken to pieces. Each display typically lasts ten to fifteen minutes and the final 'terremoto' is so violent that one cannot help but be amazed that the majority of the plaza's buildings are still standing at all.

There is of course a history of incidents associated with Las Fallas and it's Mascletas. Last year one of the rockets, effectively a grenade on a stick, failed to take off properly and fell into the crowd. It exploded amongst a trapped sea of bodies and put twenty-four people in hospital, some with wounds through to the bone. Imagine that in the U.K.: end of 'Mascletas' and a serious public enquiry.

But not in Valencia, nor anywhere in Spain, are such considerations allowed to come before the pursuit of public pleasure. Back in the sixteenth century Filipe II refused to ban bull runs at public fiestas; despite his own dislike for the affairs, endless accidents and pressure from his ministers, he realized that his subjects were too fond of these events, and that it would therefore be unfair to put a stop to them.

This attitude is just as prevalent today as it was then. There is a notable lack of petty bureaucracy or restrictive regulations: if people want to be stupid, to put themselves at risk, then let them face the consequences. But it's nearly two years since they were forced to stop the annual live goat-drop from a church tower in one Aragonese village; and another town in Galicia was warned that it's autumnal raft races might have to stop after a spate of drunken drownings. Can all this lunacy continue in these times of pan-euro-morality? The evidence suggests that it can.

During my first 'Las Fallas' I attended a memorable burning on the last day of the fiesta. 'Falla' is the name given to the satirical wooden and papier-maché statues, some up to twenty metres high, which Valencian craftsmen spend twelve months of the year planning and building - Mascletas aside, this is what the fiesta is all about. At midnight on the nineteenth, having been on display for a week in plazas all over the city, these things are razed to the ground. By chance I'd found myself in front of the year's top prize winner: this one would be going up last.

A barrier had been erected at a safe distance, we leaned on it and watched preparations get underway; a crowd built up behind. Strings and strings of bangers were looped over the structure, which depicted a scene from a fairy tale. Larger explosives were pushed through holes that had been knocked in its side, firemen turned up and started to spray nearby walls in an uncharacteristic display of common sense.

Bottles of kerosene were fetched and everything was dowsed liberally, then to my absolute horror, as a young lady was about to set the thing alight by firing a rocket along a string from an overlooking balcony, all the barriers were removed! If the crowd pushed forward we'd be incinerated - the flames rose, explosions cracked left right and centre, the wind shifted in our direction, the heat was getting unbearable, this was madness! The firemen turned the hoses on us, everyone cheered, and the falla disappeared in a fiery shroud.

What misadventure, what irresponsibility (this would never be allowed…) - whatever happened to 'following the Fireworks Code'? But what fun - irrepressible vitality surges through it all. While the happiness of the masses still counts for something in Spain, questionably sane traditions will never be quashed for 'what-ifs' and 'maybes'. And long may that continue, for without 'Las Fallas', Valencia could not be Valencia, and without these small lunacies, Spain would no longer be Spain.