In Spain, Las Fallas celebrations include huge wooden sculptures, bonfires and fireworks. (Photo by D. Hunter Reardon)
On a Friday afternoon in Gandia, Spain, I was jumping rope at a park by the river. Once, I had been confounded by the Mediterranean custom that sees shops and schools close in the afternoon, but after six months spent teaching English in a small town, it had become part of my daily rhythm. Still, unwilling to be completely unproductive, I’d made a habit of exercising during this lull the Spanish call a siesta.
Normally a sleepy interlude that leaves streets empty, this particular afternoon was buzzing with energy. It was a week and a half before Las Fallas, a Valencian celebration to mark the Feast of St. Joseph. Like many religious festivals in Spain, it is characterized by processions, traditional music and revelry; in the case of Las Fallas, fireworks are set off both night and day, and it climaxes with the incineration of massive wooden sculptures erected throughout all major cities and towns.
If I hadn’t already been jumping, I might have jumped in surprise. At the other end of the park, about a dozen unsupervised children no older than 6 were playing with firecrackers and Roman candles. If this were Bryan Park, the scene would have been interrupted by police — for one thing, fireworks of this kind are illegal in Virginia. The grandmother who showed up on the scene in short order, not to stop the explosions but to replenish their supply, could have been accused of child endangerment. Instead, she took a seat to enjoy the show. It was only a prelude to the weekend ahead.
I’d always been proud to think of America as the land of the free, and I saw Tall Timbers, the neighborhood where I grew up in Glen Allen, like a 1990s incarnation of a Norman Rockwell painting. I roamed the neighborhood, played ball in the street and fished under the train tracks on the Chickahominy River. I was privileged to live the white-picket-fence American childhood dream.
What I saw during recess time in Spain, though, was freedom on a different level. The first week I was there, two laughing 10-year-olds took turns trying to trip each other on the blacktop, while seven or eight children fought for a ball in a dogpile like Frank Beamer’s Hokies going after a fumble. Noticing my eyes wide with surprise, the fifth grade teacher shook his head and said, “Crazy kids.” As a few teachers looked on, this behavior during siesta went on for almost three hours — every single day.
What elements in small-town Spanish society have helped to preserve this unchecked sense of liberty? This is, after all, a land where bullfights are still legal. What accounts for the quasi-violent fun of celebrating the earthly father of Jesus with two dozen bonfires? It would be unwise to perform psychoanalysis on a foreign society, but there are key material differences between the U.S. and Spain, and I began to wonder if they might play a factor.
The first is that Mediterranean society is, generally speaking, very safe. Per CBS News, the homicide rate in Richmond last year was 23.84 murders per 100,000 people. In Spain, the number was 0.6. While there were a staggering 88.8 gun crimes per 100 residents last year in the U.S., the number in Spain was 10.4. During the heat of Las Fallas, there was never a question that the explosion of a massive firework might be a gunshot.
The streets of Gandia were laid out before the existence of automobiles. There are several main streets where no cars are allowed, so the risk of accidents is reduced. The town has a family-friendly layout: Jungle gyms are built alongside cafes in great plazas, so parents can sip their coffee or wine in the evening and keep an eye on distant frolicking children. Although it certainly seemed that the kids I often saw playing in the town square were unsupervised, in all likelihood, their parents were just next door, trying to flag down a waiter with one eye while they watched their children with the other.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should suddenly rush to South Carolina and buy fireworks, or that we should allow our children to reenact the Orange Bowl during recess. I did, however, attempt to unravel my own culture shock at seeing a child, no more than 18 months old, tossing poppers onto the ground from his stroller. My first reaction was to fear for his safety. My second was to realize that he wasn’t actually in danger and that my own instinct for security was as ingrained as the Spanish instinct for freedom.
Now back in the United States, I can enjoy in Richmond many things that I could not overseas. The Las Fallas processions — complete with endless parades of men and women in 18th-century cultural costumes — were amazing. But perhaps nowhere else in the world can one attend a Jewish Food Festival (January, on Monument Avenue), a Greek Festival (June, on Malvern Avenue), a Latino Festival (June, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church), a Filipino Festival (August, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church) and a Festival of India (September, Greater Richmond Convention Center) all in one year. While Spain may be safer, Richmond is just as interesting. And as an avid fisherman, I was disappointed to find that there are no largemouth bass anywhere in Europe.
Still, I believe there are lessons for us to learn in the anarchic flames of what was ultimately an incident-free — if blazing hot — Spanish night in Gandia. True violence is often driven by mistrust and anxiety. If these forces should begin to rival our spirit of independence, perhaps we might look around, take a communal deep breath and relax — just as the Spanish do each afternoon.
D. Hunter Reardon, a contributing writer for Richmond magazine and the assistant editor for The Catholic Virginian, spent seven months teaching English in the Spanish province of Valencia before returning in May 2023.
