Indians mostly welcome and celebrate spring with a festival of colors (Holi), which incidentally a night before also has an occasion to light a fire to burn the evil spirits. Similarly, Valencia welcomes the spring with its Fallas festival. Monumental, yet transitory cardboard statues are carefully built over the course of months, to then be devoured by fire in a unique spectacle. In nature it resembles more like Dussehra celebrated in India just before winters.

Las Fallas is Valencia’s most international festival. In the week of 19 March, the city fills with gigantic cardboard monuments, called ninots, for a competition that is marked by art, ingenuity and good taste. The origin of the celebration goes back to the carpenter’s parot: these were wooden lamps used to light their workshops in winter, which they would burn out in the street on the night before the feast of San José…