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travel photography

Las Fallas: The Sights and Sounds at Night

Posted on April 30, 2016

The Las Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain is filled with activity all day and is especially colorful, loud and bright at night. Every neighborhood comes alive with street parties, music, processions, loud firecrackers and crowds milling around the fallas monuments while eating buñelos or churros dunked in hot chocolate. The atmosphere at night was very festive! Here’s some night shots I took during the 2016 Las Fallas festival in March.

The fallas monuments are lit up and take on a new mood after dark.

The beautiful “Illuminations” shine brilliantly and light shows are choreographed to music. These huge lighting structures take up an entire city block and are several stories tall. So beautiful!!

The massive fireworks display during Nit de Foc is well worth staying up until 1:00am to watch among the massive crowd near the Alameda.

The grand finale, on March 19th, is the night of La Crema, when more than 700 fallas monuments scattered throughout Valencia are set ablaze surrounded by millions of spectators. There are a large number of firefighters carefully watching these massive structures burn and shoot flames high into the air, readily spraying water on them to make sure the fires stay under control and don’t damage nearby buildings. It was spectacular!

Here’s a few videos of La Crema taken by people who had a much better vantage point to film than I did:

Falla Convento (the one on the corner of the street where we stayed):

The Main Falla in Plaza del Ayuntamiento:

Falla L’Antiga de Campanar:

Valencia: Ofrendas and Falleras

Posted on April 9, 2016

For two days during the Las Fallas festival, the city of Valencia, Spain was abundant with parades of falleras and falleros in traditional costumes accompanied by musicians and bands. Over 100,000 people from Valencia and surrounding regions brought offerings of flowers to the centre of Old Town Valencia to pay homage to La Virgen de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Forsaken), the Kingdom of Valencia’s patron saint.

During the week leading up to the event, Valencians constructed a huge wooden monument of the La Virgen in the Plaza de la Virgen. On March 17th and 18th, this wooden framework was soon filled in with thousands of bouquets of carnations during La Ofrenda de Flores. I became captivated with this amazing tradition: one by one, each of the hundreds of falla communities, dressed up in their best and most colorful traditional costumes, passed by the Virgin bringing their flower offerings. The flowers were gathered up and placed into the framework “cloak” by teams of volunteers. These processions lasted for two days, 9 hours each day from 4:00 pm to 1:00 am. The parades were quite joyful as the beautifully costumed groups danced and sang to folk music as they passed by the crowds who responded with shouts of “guapa”! These processions were also quite emotional — I noticed many women wiping away tears upon reaching La Virgen and presenting their flowers.

La Ofrenda de Flores was a very inclusive tradition, with people of all ages participating — from babies, to the elderly, to the mobility challenged. It was an amazing event to witness and to photograph. My eyes fill with tears just thinking about how memorable it was to watch.

Photography Travel

Las Fallas: Preparing the Fallas

Posted on March 15, 2016

Las Fallas is one of those large and wild festivals in Spain that should be on any festival-goers bucket list. What started as a feast day for St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, has evolved into a 5-day, multifaceted celebration involving fire and fireworks. Valencia, a quiet city with a population of just over 1 million, swells to an estimated three million flame-loving revelers during Las Fallas celebrations. I’m one of those millions of people currently in Valencia to take part in this festival.

During Las Fallas, hundreds of exquisitely-crafted monuments called “fallas” are set up throughout Valencia. Each neighborhood’s falla can cost hundreds of thousands of euros and teams of artists have work on these for an entire year. Valencians create these fallas, which are incredible works of art as unique, funny, satirical and thoughtful tributes to past year.

The fallas have been getting set up over the last few days using cranes, workers to assemble each piece and craftsmen to touch them up with paint. They must be completely assembled by tomorrow morning and then the judging will begin. The best fallas will receive rewards. They will be on display until March 19th, La Crema, when (you might have guessed) they set them all on fire!

As I’ve strolled around the neighborhoods near me and in Old Town Valencia, I’ve been photographing some of the fallas as they are being assembled to give you an idea of the amount of work and the scale of the fallas.

Photography Travel

Valencia: City of Arts and Sciences

Posted on March 12, 2016

Any visitor to Valencia, Spain, who is interested in cool architecture must visit the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. The Cuidad covers 2 kilometers and contains complexes dedicated to arts, culture, science and leisure. The architects were Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela and the project was completed in the late 1990’s.

After visiting it a few years ago when I came to Valencia the first time, I knew I would do a return visit so I could photograph it again. Here are some color infrared images as well as some monochrome images I shot in an afternoon at the Cuidad.

Photography Travel

Valencia: Soldaditos

Posted on March 5, 2016

Valencia has a great museum dedicated to re-creations of historic scenes featuring over a million toy soldiers. If you’re an avid toy soldier collector, this would be your Mecca. I enjoyed photographing all the miniature diaoramas which where elaborately displayed throughout the museum. The building itself is a very cool Gothic style palace that was the residence of the Marquis of Malferit and is well preserved. It was a nice little side trip as I strolled around a pretty part of old town Valencia.

Photography Travel

Valencia: My first Mascletá!

Posted on March 2, 2016

I’m reporting in from Valencia, Spain where I am currently documenting an amazing festival called Las Fallas.

The famous Fallas is Valencia’s most anticipated annual festival, featuring the ear-splitting Mascletá celebration which happens every day from the beginning of March until the end of the festival on the 19th of March. Each day, strings of hundreds of large firecrackers are hung by local groups in the town square. At 2pm sharp each day, thousands of onlookers and party-goers gather in the main square, Plaza del Ayuntamiento, to enjoy the explosive choreography of the petardos, the lighting of hundreds of firecrackers in all of their cadenced power and glory. Fireworks artists are allowed to use a maximum of half a metric tonne of black powder in their show as they compete for the best Mascletá.

Las Falleras Mayores on the balcony of city hall getting ready to announce the lighting of the fuse.

The crowd gathers at the Plaza. The barricaded area behind the tall fence is filled with fireworks.

It was amazingly loud during those 6 minutes of non-stop explosions in the sky. I captured it on video while holding my camera over everyone’s heads.

La Mascletá in Valencia, Spain from Carol Watson on Vimeo.

I’ll be back again tomorrow to see what the next team of pyrotechnic freaks offers up to compete with today! My goal is to get to the plaza early and get in closer.

Life in Mexico Photography

Travels in Mexico – Bacalar, Quintana Roo

Posted on November 15, 2013

We recently had our first long road trip inside Mexico after being invited by local friends to stay with them as guests at a laguna-front casa in Bacalar located on the eastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula near the border with Belize. We spent time swimming in the laguna, ventured into the jungle to see the Mayan ruins of Dzibanche and spent a day wandering the beach at Mahahual along the Costa Maya. Here’s some IR photographs from the trip.

Life in Mexico Photography

Hacienda Dreams in Central Mexico

Posted on July 7, 2013

On Friday, we went searching near La Granja, Guanajuato for what we were told was an old hacienda. We took a narrow, washboard, rutted, boulder-strewn “road” for 10 kilometers off the main highway to the supposed location.

Initially we didn’t see anything worth exploring, but after asking at a little family “store”, it turned out we were a few hundred feet from the hacienda. We drove up to the exterior walls and found a chapel, some outbuildings, old farm equipment, a corral, and a large “lawn” in front of a house attached to the chapel.

While Carol was taking photographs, a man came out of the house moving towards a truck that was parked out front. I was uncertain what to make of the situation, as we were on what was apparently private property. But I called out to the man and approached him, telling him my name, and saying we had heard about the hacienda and were curious about it.

I asked him if it was still a working hacienda, and he said “claro, que si” and pointed to all the machinery (OK, that was a dumb question on my part, but I wanted him to talk about the place). He didn’t look entirely convinced of what we were doing there, but when I asked him what he raised, he seemed to soften a bit, and proceeded to tell me about the cattle and goats, plus the fields he had planted with sorghum (a special strain from the states called “Kickapoo”) for the livestock, and maiz and frijoles.

Somewhere along the way we made a personal connection, and before we knew it, he was taking us on a full tour of the entire hacienda. We wound up spending 2 hours being led around the property, listening to stories of the history of the area. We listened to the life story of this man who bought the hacienda 18 years ago, and has been lovingly restoring it ever since.

By the time we were finished, we had met his family, exchanged phone numbers, and walked off with gift of 1.5+ kilos of home-made queso fresco.

Only in Mexico.

— Writing courtesy of my husband, Charles Vance.