The Ninots de Fallas

Pardoned figures from Valencia's biggest party

This ninot was particularly sweet

Spain loves its festivals, and Valencia is no exception. The biggest party of the year (and as of 2016, on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list) is called Fallas, and since the mid-18th century, it has been celebrated every March.

Lucky for us, the Museu Faller de València is open year-round, so we popped down to educate ourselves.

In front of the Museu

First a little history:

Fallas began as a way to celebrate the arrival of spring and celebrations for the feast of Saint Joseph. According to some sources, it was customary for artisans to burn odds and ends of wood from their workshops after the winter, including planks of wood called parots that held candles. The church encouraged the addition of Saint Joseph’s annual feast, as he is the patron saint of carpenters.

Over time, the parots were dressed up to look like people, and these are what evolved into what are known as ninots today.

This ninot with the Stepford-looking child was the oldest one we found in the museum and dates to the 1930’s

The Fallas celebration runs more or less continually (I’m told) for 5 days and nights, with fireworks and parades at 8am and 2pm and additional fireworks and other celebrations scattered throughout the days and nights. It culminates with all of the Fallas structures being burned to the ground, which is where the name of this celebration came from: Fallas means “torches”.

This ninot was designed in honor of ONCE’s 75th anniversary.

When I first heard about Fallas, I had originally thought that “ninot” referred to the larger tableaux, but apparently it’s the smaller individual figures that are ninots, which are much easier to move into an indoor setting. (The tableaux are usually three or more stories tall.)

The amount of detail on these figures makes it hard to believe they burn almost all of them to ashes!

While it makes more sense that they’re only saving a small piece of a larger work, the context of what the larger piece was about was lost on me most of the time since the descriptions were mostly in Spanish and Valenciano.

Many of the ninots have a racy and not very p.c. slant to them

The museum also had the advertising posters for each year of Fallas from the mid-30’s on, which were incredible as well, and large portrait paintings of each year’s Fallera mejor.

And many are poking fun at someone or something

All in all, this little specialized museum was a treat to explore and a great introduction for us to Fallas.

Here’s a classic “what the ???” scene

A line up of ninots from the 30’s and 40’s