Careful with That Axe, Eugene

Bétera, near Valencia, mid August, years ago. Our friends had taken us to join the crowd in the main street. We didn't quite know why. They weren't explaining and our Spanish wasn't up to asking. When the fireworks, hung from overhead lines, started to go off and shower the crowd with sparks and flame we knew what to do though. We retreated before the wall of fire. The end of the street was sealed, there was nowhere to go; hundreds of us cowered, cheek by jowl, knowing, or at least trusting, that the flames and sparks wouldn't reach us. And sputter out they did. 

The next night we went back to the same place to join in the fiesta. We noticed there were no parked cars and that all the windows were boarded up. As midnight approached our friends herded us back to the car and abandoned the town centre. We didn't know why. We found out though. After midnight gangs of young people wearing overalls and crash helmets, and with at least one fire extinguisher per group, just in case, mount a firefight using Roman candles. In Elche, on the Nit d'Alba, they used to do something similar. First the official firework display but later, much later, the same idea. Firework armed gangs battling it out.

The Day of the Innocents, a reminder of the day when the biblical Herod had all the male babies under two put to the sword to protect his crown from a potential usurper, Spaniards do what we Britons do on April 1st. In Ibi there is a bit of a fight that day. The Ibenses, like the Beterenses and Ilicitanos, use fireworks but first they go to work with flour and eggs. The Spanish word for flour is harina, the word in the local Valencian language is farina. The event is called els (the) Enfarinats (floury ones).There's more to it but, in brief, one group elects a mayor and other officials to run the town and another group takes exception to this coup and stages a counter coup. That's when the flour and eggs fly, the flares go off and the bangers and jumping  jacks bang and jump.

The first time I saw els Enfarinats in 2011 their fight evolved in front of the church in the old part of town. I watched from a safe distance. I thought it was bonkers. The second time, in 2016, I got in much closer at the risk of a camera dusted with flour and garnished with egg. I took a pal there in 2022, a couple of weeks ago. This time the fight wasn't in front of the church because the church square was one big building site. The battlefield had been moved to an ordinary looking street with a PA system blasting out reggaeton as the event got underway. There was a wire fence type enclosure around the battle zone. The clash had two halves, like a Crystal Palace v Brighton and Hove Albion game. For the flour part anyone could get reasonably close but only outside the fence. In the second half, with fireworks, it was Enfarinats and pass holders only. We sat some fifty metres away in tiered seating to watch. It wasn't the nearly participative event I remembered; it was something I viewed as a spectator. I know in Elche that, to take part in the firework battle, you now have to attend a pre-event training course.

People say that health and safety rules are regularly flouted in Spain. It's true and it's not true. Sensible health and safety practices are ignored all the time, everywhere, by people who decide that those ideas are a bit silly, a bit unnecessary or too much faff. Most of us clamber onto a wobbly kitchen chair from time to time to reach the top shelf or sprawl out in the sun without sunscreen but for some people H&S has become so second nature that they'd never go up a ladder without someone at the bottom or fix the wonky toaster by prodding at its insides with a kitchen knife. The smaller, the more domestic, the situation the less likely that safety will be the paramount consideration.

Eleven or twelve years ago I taught some English to the management staff of the Dos Mares Shopping Centre in San Javier. I remember their building officer pacing the room and cursing after a visit from the H&S inspector. "Can you imagine," seethed my pupil, "I've already got two blokes on the cherry picker we use to do maintenance at height on the building. One on the ground holding on to ropes and harnesses that are fastened to the bloke on the platform. Both wearing goggles and hats and gloves and safety boots and this idiot wants a third person in the team. I asked him why - will he be there to catch the falling man if the harnesses and ropes fail? Lunacy". 

I remember someone who worked for the Town Hall in Pinoso sacking a building firm he'd hired in 2007 because the building workers were not using any safety gear whilst they worked on his private house. "I make sure people follow the rules," he said, "how can I possibly have people flouting those same rules when they work on my house?" And yet, in Forcall last year I watched as people ran in and out of a burning bonfire, in Vilanova d'Alcolea for Sant Antoni they have horses running through fire and locally I've run in amongst people dressed as devils as they unleashed fireworks left right and centre. 

Now I understand a bit better how things Spanish work I've often wondered about going back to Betera to run away from those fireworks again but I've had trouble finding the details. Maybe it's because what we did then won't fit behind a fence and so it's just not acceptable anymore.

Valencianos have a reputation for liking fireworks

I don't quite remember when but it was long before we lived here. We were in Spain for a holiday and a couple of friends, Pepa and Jaime, invited us to stay in their flat in Bétera near Valencia.

Bétera was having its annual fiesta and we went into town one evening to take part. I think there was a parade, there were stalls and a fair, we ate some tapas, we drank some beer and all sorts of normal fiesta things.

The next evening we went back to the fiesta and to the town centre. We didn't park in the same place. We walked much further than we had the night before. I didn't know why. As we walked through the streets in the centre of the town most of the windows were boarded up, there were no cars in the streets. The whole town was odd. Either Jaime and Pepa didn't explain very well or we didn't have enough Spanish to understand what was going on.

We waited in the main street with hundreds of other people. At the appointed hour someone lit the blue touch paper and suddenly there was a wall of fire advancing down the street towards us. I don't think we'd been expecting that. How it worked was that there was a principal cord running down the centre of the street and there were other fireworks hung on other ropes that went from the buildings on one side of the street to the other so that they criss crossed that central cord. As the waterfall of fire advanced the crowd fell back, the more foolhardy close to the fireworks and the wiser further back. Wading through the fire zone, just behind the main fire-front, were some blokes dressed in overalls and crash helmets carrying fire extinguishers. They were there to pluck up the fallen or to guide the panic stricken to safety and, if needs be, to put out anyone who was on fire. The cord ran into a square but the fireworks stopped a few metres short of it so that, once you were in the square, you were safe. The fun was that all the people who had been in the street, and all the people who had been in the square before the fireworks started, had to fit into an ever dwindling area as the fire pushed us all back. A bit like that scene in Bambi. It was a tad sardine like and Harvey Weinstein would have been busy but as the fireworks fell silent and fizzled out we were still alive and unscathed.

When it was over Jaime made us run back to the car insisting that we only had minutes to reach safety. We had no idea why. As we headed back we passed several groups of people who were putting the finishing touches to their own version of the uniform of overalls, crash helmets and gloves with lots of duct tape to seal the joins. They didn't have extinguishers and fire blankets though. They were arming up with Roman Candle type fireworks and, at one or maybe two in the morning the signal would be given that they could engage in all out warfare on the streets of Bétera. We saw something very similar years later on the streets of Elche on the Nit de l'Albà - the Night of the Dawn. That's why the properties were boarded up, that was why there were no cars and that's why we were parked well out of harms way.

The Cordá, for that's what it is called was on last night, the 15th August, in Bétera. The subsequent firework fight is, I think, called la Coheta 

Every year, since we've lived here, it crosses my mind that we should go back to Bétera for the event. It was one of the maddest fiestas that I've ever been involved in and it's been one of my stock stories for over thirty years, right up with that one about being on the wrong side of the fence, with fighting bulls, in Ciudad Rodrigo. So I set to looking up the details of times and things yesterday. I found some videos on YouTube of lots of people on the streets but they were all booted and suited. Then I found a form to apply for permission to be on the street for the Cordá. I didn't bother to read any further but it was obvious enough, now you have to apply to be potentially set on fire by a curtain of fire and you can't just turn up on a whim. 

I was telling Maggie. "Well, it's like Britons always say, Health and Safety wouldn't allow this in the UK - now they don't allow it in Spain either". Actually, I suppose that improves our story. When men were men and Spain was Spain and all that. Or it could be that I've misremembered the whole thing.