Dangerous driving time

This year Easter has come early. That is welcome, but it has come up against the Fallas celebrations in Valencia and that has caused not just a little confusion.

Fallas is Valencia's biggest fiesta of the year which starts just before the first of March and continues through until March 19th. On this day we celebrate el Dia de San Jose, or Father's Day, and unlike Father's Day in most other countries, which tends to be quiet and sedate, we blow things up and burn things down. The 19th is also the final day of Las Fallas. The monuments have been put in place for five days. More than three million people have come to view close to one thousand monuments and now it's time to close this chapter until next year.

The city shuts about 900 streets making driving practically non-existent. People have to walk everywhere, but then you would want to because there is so much to see. There were, as usual, some masterpieces erected, and by all accounts the fiesta  was a tremendous success.

I deliberately avoided the whole thing. I took a complete rest from Fallas this year. Sometimes I find its refreshing to do that because it does get to seem like a lot of the same thing. However, there were a couple of monuments that I saw in the papers and on television that were exceptional. It all depends on what was happening at and before the time the designers sit down to plan next year's event. There are so many fraud and corruption trials going on, and all manner of things happening on the political scene that I think designers were spoilt for choice.

Many people who live in Valencia leave the city and come to our part of the country to get away from the noise because we will not have our celebrations for the next two weeks. No matter what other reasons are given for Fallas the favourite one is to make as much noise as `possible to chase away the old man of Winter. Since it works without fail every year we keep doing it.

From the driving perspective there were all those people getting out of town at the same time so many more were flooding in. No sooner did Fallas end did Holy Week begin the very next day with Palm Sunday walk. There were preparations for that taking place in the midst of Fallas, and the mass exodus for parts elsewhere to celebrate Easter began. Road traffic numbers swelled to alarming proportions but during the first day no traffic deaths were reported anywhere in Spain. That couldn't last, of course, and by Sunday more than twenty people had died, four of those were motorcyclists and fifteen were students from Barcelona who travelled down to Valencia for Fallas by bus.

It is always a tragedy when people, especially young people die at the very time they are trying to have a good time. We have another week to go before everybody returns, so let us keep our fingers crossed that they do so in safety.

(c) Copyright 2016

Eugene Carmichael