Las Fallas 2021
Fallas Especiales at Night
The fallas always look better at night with ideal lighting and no harsh shadows to deal with. Due to the COVID curfew, I just barely managed to hit all of the Special Section fallas during the nighttime hours. Sunset was at 8:30 pm, it didn't get truly dark until after 9, and then everything started shutting down at midnight to comply with the 1 am curfew. But I did make it to all of them!
Fallas Especiales
The Special Section fallas during the daytime. Usually I try to see all of them during both the day and night, but a lot of these were still access-limited on day 1 and the crews were making repairs from the thunderstorm the night before. So I skipped over them quickly at the time intending to loop back on day 4, but never did.
Fallas
All the fallas in sections 1B and below.
Fallas Seccion 1A
I try to see all the Section 1A fallas, but utterly failed this year. Only made it to 10 of the 16 1A fallas, and missed out on what looked to be a pretty cool Alice in Wonderland themed falla (which took 9th place).
Fallas at Night
The 1 am COVID curfew combined with the September dates which meant sunset happening 90 minutes later than in March (8:30 pm vs 7:00 pm) meant that there was not a whole lot of time available for night time wanderings. I was barely able to make it to all the Special Section fallas after dark.
La Crema
The time was moved up to 10 pm instead of midnight this year to accomodate the 1 am COVID curfew in effect, and many of the Special Section fallas weren't allowing spectators. But I was still able to catch two of the smaller fallas.
Fallas Infantiles
The smaller, more kid-friendly fallas.
The Festival
Not much here, since a lot of events were canceled. All the fallas were still put up, but a lot of the other activities that usually go on were missing.
Pre-Festival
I arrived in Valencia early enough this year to see quite a bit of "La Planta", where they assemble everything. Some photos in this gallery are the only photos I have of undamaged fallas. A huge thunderstorm rolled through Valencia the night before the festival started and caused some noticeable damage to a few of them.
Not Safe For Work
Not a whole lot here, other than the main feature of a section 1A falla. Everything I ran across was pretty well behaved this year.