Franco Dictatorship & Festival Contestation

Castile and the unified Spanish monarchy.

1 chapter

1808 - 1936

The Napoleonic invasion, liberal revolution, and industrialization of the 19th century reshaped Valencian society and created the conditions for modern festival formalization. The silk industry that had centered on La Lonja since the 15th century fed directly into the elaborate fallera costumes that emerged as Fallas evolved from neighborhood bonfires into organized spectacle. In 1928, José María Py formalized the Hogueras de San Juan in Alicante, combining pre-existing midsummer solstice bonfire traditions with Fallas-style artistic structures — a documented case of calendar-layering where solstice fire ritual, Fallas satirical sculpture, and Saint John Christian naming all remain visible. The Carlist Wars of the 19th century, fought bitterly in Valencia's interior mountains, left fortified towns like Buñol marked by conflict — a context that later shaped local festival traditions. In Ibi, the toy manufacturing industry that emerged in this period created the economic base for distinctive local celebrations; the Museo Valenciano del Juguete preserves that industrial-era material culture. This era also saw the codification of Valencian as a literary and political language: Lo Rat Penat organized satirical verse contests in Valencian as part of Fallas, a practice that would become crucial during the Franco-era suppression of the language.

From 1975

Spain's democratic transition restored Valencian self-governance and unleashed a revival of festival traditions that had been censored or co-opted under Franco. With the end of the dictatorship, 'the critical falles reappeared, and obscene satirical ones with them' — the Museu Fallero now displays the full arc from censored ninots to contemporary political satire. The Estatut d'Autonomia of 1982 created the Generalitat Valenciana and the Corts Valencianes; the Palau de la Generalitat became once again the seat of Valencian self-government, architecturally refurbished from 1982 onwards. The Statute was reformed in 2006, reaffirming the Comunitat Valenciana as a historic nationality. UNESCO inscribed the Misteri d'Elx (2001/2008), the Tribunal de les Aigües (2009), and the Fallas (2016) as Intangible Cultural Heritage — international recognition that simultaneously preserves and can smooth over internal conflicts about festival meaning and censorship history. In Castellón de la Plana, the Fiestas de la Magdalena commemorate the city's 1251 founding with the Gaiata lighted procession — a Castellón-specific tradition rooted in the same calendar of fire and light that runs through Fallas and Hogueras. Today, watch the Tribunal de les Aigües convene every Thursday at noon at the Cathedral's Puerta de los Apóstoles, hear oral proceedings in Valencian, and see a 1,000-year-old Islamic-era institution operate in a 21st-century democratic community. Stand in the Basilica de Santa María in Elche on August 14 and watch La Magrana — the medieval aerial device — descend through the basilica's nave as it has since the 15th century. The key question for today: how do these traditions navigate between tourist spectacle, political instrumentalization, and genuine community practice?

1707 - 1808

The Bourbon victory in the War of Spanish Succession brought the Nueva Planta decrees of 29 June 1707, signed by Philip V — a foundational trauma in Valencian collective memory. The decrees completely abolished the Furs of Valencia, the Corts Valencianes, and the Generalitat, incorporating the Kingdom of Valencia into the Crown of Castile under Castilian law. Stand before the Palau de la Generalitat in Valencia: after 1707, the building that housed Valencian self-governance was repurposed as the seat of the new Bourbon Audiencia, a visible symbol of institutional erasure. Xàtiva, which had resisted the Bourbons, was burned and its name officially changed to 'San Felipe' — the birthplace of the Borgia popes was literally erased from the map as punishment. Climb to Xàtiva Castle and the scars of that destruction are part of the site's story. The Nueva Planta was not merely administrative modernization: it was a rupture of institutional continuity that directly shapes how Valencian identity relates to the Spanish state to this day. Do not romanticize the pre-1707 Kingdom — the Furs served an elite, and the Morisco population had already been expelled — but do not erase the specificity of what was lost: named, functioning institutions of self-governance that had existed for over four centuries.

1238 - 1707

The Crown of Aragon conquered the Islamic kingdom of Balansiya in 1238, establishing the Kingdom of Valencia as a separate political entity with its own Furs (laws promulgated by James I in 1261), its own Generalitat, and its own Corts Valencianes — institutions distinct from those of Aragon and Catalonia. This foral self-governance is the institutional memory that makes Valencian identity politically distinct. Stand before the Torres de Serranos, the 14th-century gates where the city's liberties were symbolically guarded, and you face the physical boundary of a self-governing medieval kingdom. The Conquest also created the cultural conditions for two of Valencia's defining festival traditions: the Misteri d'Elx, a mystery play performed in Valencian in the Basilica de Santa Maria since the mid-15th century (Consueta manuscripts survive from 1625), and the Moros i Cristians of Alcoy, documented since the 16th century, commemorating a 1276 battle against Muslim raiders. Both traditions are complex: the Misteri is a liturgical drama in Valencian that may have survived the Council of Trent's prohibition through a papal exemption (widely claimed but not verified), and Moros i Cristians re-enacts an imagined Islam through Orientalist costume while the actual Islamic-descended community was being systematically expelled. In 1609, Philip III ordered the expulsion of all Moriscos from Valencia; within three months, approximately 116,000 people — 33% of the population — were removed. Over 200 villages disappeared. The interior mountain regions where Moriscos had cultivated the land became deserted. Arabic place names (Beni-, -ena) survived as landscape fossils, and the acequia irrigation system continued under Christian management, but the community that created these was gone. This rupture — the single largest in Valencian cultural continuity — means any claim of unbroken Islamic-era tradition must account for this gap. Walk the medieval streets of Morella in Castellón's interior and you pass through a landscape emptied by that expulsion and slowly repopulated by settlers from elsewhere.