On any given day, somewhere in Spain, in some town or city or sleepy little village, a fiesta will be going on. The Spanish just love an excuse to throw a party.
In Valor, September is fiesta time, and the locals are rightly proud of the spectacle that overtakes the village on the 13th, 14th and 15th every year.
The Valor fiesta commemorates the final conflicts between the Moors and Christians, in their last Moorish bastion of the Alpujarras during the Morisco revolt of 1568 to 1571. King Philip the second of Spain is alleged to have deliberately provoked the uprising by persecuting the Moors, and the ensuing bloody conflict resulted ultimately, in the death of the Morisco king Aben Humeya, and the deportation of the remaining Moors. The Alpujarras was then repopulated with settlers from other areas of Spain.
The fiesta celebrations start with a procession featuring huge caricatures of Aben Humeya and his wife (or at least one of them!). Musical accompaniment, is supplied by a local brass band (the band are also usefully deployed to walk around the entire village at an ungodly hour in the morning just in case you need waking up after partying too long and hard). As you can imagine, the caricature costumes are very heavy in the Spanish sun, and the local bar owners help to keep the wearers fully hydrated by supplying them with beer. This also helps the caricatures to sway realistically to the music.
Following closely behind Mr & Mrs Humeya is rather bizarrely, a manikin in a blonde wig riding on the back of a green dragon. Don't ask, I've never worked that one out either.
Children are rarely excluded from the proceedings in Spain, and here they take part in the procession dressed in "big head" costumes. Occasionally it seems, having a little difficulty in finding their way!
As with the blonde on the dragon, I've no idea if there is any sort of historical significance to the big heads, but it all adds to the unique charm of this fiesta, which has everything from the slightly tacky and home-made to the superbly professional.
Fireworks play a huge part in Spanish fiestas and the Valor fiesta is no exception to this rule. From the man following the procession setting off rockets from his hand (imagine that getting past health & safety in the UK!), to spontaneous bursts of rockets and large spectacular displays, you are treated to some of the noisiest and most colourful pyrotechnics you could wish for.
The amount spent on fireworks for just this one village fiesta must be phenomenal. On the second evening of the fiesta, the large and heavy crucifix is taken down from the church and carried at shoulder height around the village. At each barrio or neighbourhood, the crucifix stops and hundreds of rockets shoot up into the air from nearby. The entire procession takes around two hours, with possibly a dozen or so of these stops and rocket launches. As the crucifix is returned to the church, the finale is a barrage of rockets and air bombs of truly biblical proportions. I'm lucky enough never to have been in a war zone, but I imagine it must sound something like this. It's not only deafening, you can actually feel it reverberating through your body.
The photo below shows just a small number of the rockets awaiting launch, which might give you some idea of the scale.
On all three nights of the Valor fiesta, bands play on a stage constructed in the church square, and drinks are sold from a temporary bar. The population is swelled by visitors from the surrounding villages and from further afield and the whole place turns into a buzzing dance party until first light. Rather more pasa doble than P Diddy though, if you get the picture, but none the worse for that. For somebody like myself, brought up in the UK, it is certainly an eye opener to see everyone from toddlers, to teenagers, right up to old dodderers all having fun and enjoying themselves at the same time.
The highlight of the Valor fiesta, for me at least, is the battle re-enactment on the final day. This is a spectacular blend of bands, parades, horsemanship, speeches and thunderous battles featuring the men of the village decked out in Moorish and Christian battle dress, and sporting a motley collection of the loudest shotguns and blunderbusses you're ever likely to hear.
A really great spectacle that the people of Valor have every right to be proud of.
And if after three days of noise, booze and partying you're feeling a little jaded, don't turn in too early. Get up on the roof terrace with a nightcap in hand and at about one or one thirty in the morning you will be treated to another truly beautiful display of fireworks to bring proceedings to a close. I'm afraid my poor photograph does not do this any justice at all.
All in all, I can highly recommend Valor fiesta. If you get the chance to visit the Aplujarras at this time of year, try not to miss it.
As you can imagine, with such an influx of visitors, accommodation can be tricky to find and you will need to plan ahead and book early. You could try companies such as Owners Direct, and other local hoteliers and proprietors who often feature in our Google Ads section on this blog. You could also contact Los Arcos, who have a link on this page, however they often close for the fiesta as their location directly in the church square is a little too noisy for most guests during the fiesta.
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Thanks for reading The Road to Valor, and if you have your own favourite Spanish fiesta, why not post a comment below. I'd love to hear about it.
All the best!
For most people who dream of relocating to Spain, the beautiful year round climate is one of the major factors. So it's easy to forget that particularly in higher altitude areas like the Alpujarras, weather conditions can vary dramatically both day to day, and also from what you might expect for the time of year.
