Valencia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, is a lively city during any season. But in March it literally explodes into a festival known as Las Fallas — the fires. The festival is thought to have begun with the annual spring cleaning of the city’s many carpentry shops, when the winter’s accumulation of wood scraps and candle ends were burned in each neighborhood. Small papier-mâché figures were later added, finally growing into today’s 20-foot caricatures of everyone from sports celebrities to world political figures. More recently, polystyrene replaced papier-mâché, its lighter weight allowing for even taller effigies.

These giant figures, called ninots, often stand in groups of 20 or more that fill an entire plaza and begin to decorate neighborhoods in the weeks before the mid-March celebration. From early in the month, each afternoon the city center reverberates with the Mascletà, a massive concert of explosives in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. This pyrotechnic extravaganza repeats daily at 2 p.m. and ends the festival with a deafening display on the final night of March 19.

A ninot melding a contemporary style with a Baroque feel © Stillman Rogers Photography

Meanwhile, individual neighborhoods decorate their streets with arcades of colored lights and stage their own miniature Mascletàs. Each night at about 1:30 a.m., giant fireworks displays are set off in the Paseo de la Alameda, viewed by throngs of people gathered along the bridges.

Simultaneous with this secular festival, an equally colorful religious one centers around the plaza in front of the cathedral. For two days and into the nights, hundreds of processions of elaborately dressed women and girls from all over the surrounding region carry bouquets of flowers through the streets and into the plaza, accompanied by local marching bands. As they reach the front of the cathedral, they deposit their bouquets to form the robes of a towering statue of the Virgin Mary. This Ofrenda de Flores in Plaza de la Virgen continues March 17 and 18, when the Virgin Mary’s fragrant costume is completed.

About 7 p.m. on March 19, the Cabalgata del Foc takes over on Calle Colón. The name means “parade of fire,” and that’s what it is: a colorful — if frightening — succession of devils and demons waving and throwing lighted torches, dragons breathing real fire, jugglers tossing flaming clubs, all among showering sparks and flying fireworks.

Crowds move about the neighborhoods for a last look at the finished ninots before these are all simultaneously torched at midnight. It doesn’t take long for the statues to ignite and become engulfed in towers of flame that reach above the surrounding four- and five-story buildings. The last to be set ablaze is the huge tableau in front of the city hall, which burns to the accompaniment of a final massive and deafening Mascletà.