If you are living in the Valencian community in Spain, you probably know what are the most important "festivals" that are specific to this area... One of them is "Fallas de Valencia", which is mainly celebrated in Valencia city, but the other one, Moros I Cristianos (Moors and Christians) is celebrated in many different places... Big cities, towns, and even villages keep the tradition alive year by year...
What is the point of the festival? Well, that's hard to tell as Spaniards like to celebrate everything that can be celebrated š, but officially, the festival commemorates the battles, combats, and fights between Muslims and Christians that took place from the VIII century throughout to XV century... You can find more details about it at Wikipedia page...
Yesterday, the neighboring town Altea, celebrated this festival and I went out to check it out... In general, it is like any other town festival with an amusement park, music concerts, etc., but with one difference... They do a parade through the city center wearing traditional clothes by Moors (Muslims) and Christians of that time... In some places, they even organize the parading of Muslim ships and debarkment from the sea...
As it was impossible to park a car anywhere near the city center, I had a pleasant evening walk too as I parked in the port... :)
This is just a part of the parade that was moving through the city center... As you can notice, they were parading in groups where every group had a different theme/clothes, and every group had its music band! As they were groups of maybe 50 people, you had a mix of at least 3 different bands at the same time... playing different melodies... š
The thing is that the audience was moving along with the parade and when they left the main street, only after 5-10 minutes, it looked "spooky empty"... Like nothing happened...
Except for the paper confetti that was proof that something big happened here... š
I suppose that some local politician had their speech on the balcony of the Town Hall, but luckily, I have missed that... š
After leaving the main street, the next stop was visiting the amusement park that was organized in the other part of the town... I know that the "olla" ("cooking pot" in English) is popular among Spaniards and at first sight, I thought that this was it, but I got suspicious when I saw that people were getting seat-belted heavily... At the "common" olla, they just sit on the bench and it goes up and down, like riding a mechanical bull... But this thing went up and down and all around... Check out the video for details... š
This one is standard and you probably saw it at your place too...
From this one, I expected more as it looked from the distance as more scary than it was... I remember a similar ride, in the "cage", but on the ship which was swinging... and I remember seeing people upside-down at the top of the swing... I suppose that the scariest thing on this one was that it was pretty high...
On the way back to the car, I took a couple of photos of the main street decorations... Some of them are "official" ones, and some of them are decorated by the people who are living in those buildings...
I didn't expect that the biggest challenge would be to find the official poster of the festival... As it was night, I saw a couple, but it was impossible to take a photo and in the end, I found this digital screen at the tourist info office... As you can see, the festival will last a few more days, so if you are near, you can come and visit it!
Don't forget to check out the video of those crazy rides from the amusement park... Nobody was hurt during the filming of this event... š
Thank you for your time,
ph
Music in video:
Growing Up by Scott Buckley https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley
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