In former times, Valencia was a city of carpenters and furniture makers. During winter months, guild members spent time cleaning their workshops, leaving broken furniture and other wood materials out on the streets. Eventually large sculptures were made from the scraps to honor Saint Josep, or San José, patron saint of carpenters and the city of Valencia. These would later be ceremoniously set ablaze along with other unwanted papers and household items in an act of purification as part of the March festivities we now know as the Fallas. For weeks we have been witnessing the rat-a-tat-tat-ting of firecrackers and what sounds like cannon fire and occasional plumes of fireworks bursting over rooftops.
Giant lifts have arrived on our street to set up glittery lights that span the width of Caller Sueca and put the Christmas season’s decorations to shame. (This is a heartening sense of priorities in my humble opinion.) Every neighborhood has their official Fallas organization and club and representatives and we increasingly see men, women, boys and girls dressed in traditional costumes, like ambassadors from the 19th century. The rising energy level on the streets is palpable. This town is squirming to party.
One afternoon we went to the science museum in the Palau de Belles Artes complex to see La Exposición de Ninot. The sculptures that each neighborhood has specially designed for this year’s Fallas celebration are on display there. In a large hall we found row after row of figures that looked like they came from a Disney animation workshop. No longer made from scrap wood, professional guilds now produce the modern Fallas sculptures from paper maché. The finished pieces have a sleek smoothness and an almost plastic sheen. Most have a cartoony feel, exaggerated caricatures that quickly narrate a story or message. Some are political, others parochial, many intended to make you laugh, like the fat lady who is looking for her puppy who she has unknowingly sat on and smashed in her butt crack. The poor animal! Or Putin and Trump. Trump is taking a selfie while Putin holds a knife behind his back. Your 3-euro entrance fee to the Ninot exhibit gives you the right to vote on your favorite. Only two with the most votes out of the hundreds of entries will be spared. The rest will be set on fire as a sacrifice to the patron saint of carpenters.
Falla sculpture at the 2018 Exposición del Ninot.
This week our daughter Willa, who is en route to an internship at the American Academy of Rome’s sustainable kitchen program, and Vermont farmer activists, Will Allen and Kate Duesterberg, came to visit. We have been frequenting the markets and cooking up a storm of meals complemented by some highly drinkable wines from Augustin Rico’s Ultramarinos on the Grand Via de las Germanies. Sunday was a rare sunny day approaching 70 degrees, and we walked through the park that spans the whole length of the city known as El Rio. The park is all that’s left of the river that used to run through Valencia, which seems tragic. To be sure, there were thousands of people out enjoying all that El Rio has to offer: soccer fields and par courses and running and bike tracks, skateboard parks, fountains, picturesque bridges, and greenery. Personally, I wish there was still a river.
We walked three miles through the park to a neighborhood called Cabanyal. This is near the beach and in years past was the barrio of fisher folk. The two-story traditional houses that remain are charming and the whole area is undergoing redevelopment which has been in the works for decades and involved a controversial forced relocation and demolition of many blocks of residences. The existing old homes are now being snapped up in an international real estate boom. The world has discovered Valencia as one of the last cities to gentrify along the Mediterranean coast. The clock is ticking. We are grateful to have seen it up close and personal when we did.
Walking in the Cabanyal is very enjoyable, not just because of the fishermen’s houses which feel a bit Portuguese with the ceramic tiles on the facades and beautiful balconies and tall classic wooden doors and bright colors, but also because there are many cafes and restaurants and walking streets that take you out to the Malvarrosa Beach where the Spaniards are playing ultimate frisbee and sand volleyball and roller skating on the boardwalk and sitting at restaurants eating their Sunday afternoon paellas while looking at the sea.
One of the sought after houses in Valencia’s Cabanyal district.
We stopped at my favorite tapas bar perhaps in all of Spain. Casa Montaña apparently was founded in 1836 and we made sure to be there when the doors opened because it is extremely popular and very small. There are dark stained barrels in the bar room and white marble counter tops and you feel like you are in an authentic Spanish bodega. We opted for a table in the restaurant rather than the bar and ordered well: thinly sliced grilled young artichokes, Valencian tomato salad, roasted patatas bravas with aioli and a spicy pepper sauce, Padrón peppers, marinated sashimi grade tuna, grilled calamari dusted with seaweed flakes, and goat cheese toasts drizzled with honey and balsamic vinegar and tiny flowers with a spicy kick which tasted like dessert and of course a few glasses of vino tinto. After this great meal we walked along the beach and then three miles back to Ruzafa in the warm coastal sunshine.
That day was an exception as it’s been raining ever since and people have complained about the unusually cold winter weather. Snow has blanketed the streets of Rome and our friends are a bit depressed by the invernal gloom hovering over southern France for the last three months. The Arctic is 45 degrees above normal and at the southern end of the earth penguins are racing against time as their habitat vanishes into the sea. Meanwhile, inside the Shit Hole there are natural resource and environmental protection agencies led by climate change deniers. Within some departments, it is even apparently off limits to say the words “climate change,” which gives a brave new Orwellian spin to the scientific method. “Please leave your brain at the door. Don’t forget to pick it up after work.”
I often think back to a single day last summer when my 88 year-old mother was visiting from Pennsylvania. It was early September and she is a great fan of professional tennis so we were watching the US Open on television. Outside of our Northern California home, however, we were experiencing a fifth consecutive day of blazing temperatures, at least 105, but I think it was approaching 110. It was so bloody hot we didn’t even want to go outside for a short walk to the pool. We would have to become, so it seemed, nocturnal animals.
When wind fueled wild fires ravaged Sonoma County a month later destroying over 7,000 homes and buildings, leaving tens of thousands of acres of Northern California charred and its communities in a state of post traumatic stress, connecting the dots was rather easy. A decade of rising record high summer temperatures, an extreme four-year drought cycle, fire suppression, unpredictable wind and storm events. It is difficult to watch from afar, as the president of the United States abdicates his responsibility of leadership to do something about the greatest crisis facing not just humanity but all plants and animals and living systems alike. History will not be kind to him. Unfortunately, the whole world suffers this lunacy of inaction and will continue to suffer for many decades to come, if we live that long. Please, Jesus or Jupiter or Thor or Venus or anyone who’s listening, send us a sign or a well placed lightning strike. Purification at least is coming to Valencia.
