The Chinese face of Valencia

by Bill Cranfield

Valencia is a very Chinese city, which is probably why it has taken to its bosom so many Chinese restaurants, all-purpose “Made In China” stores and bargain-basement garment emporia — most of the latter side-by-side in the Calle Cuba.

It is also, of course, the centre of the only dedicated rice-growing region of Spain and hence the inventor of what is often, wrongly, regarded as the national dish — paella.

But much more than all of that, the Valencianos share personal characteristics with most of the Middle Kingdom: they are relatively hard-working, in Spanish terms; money-mad; introverted (again, in a Spanish context, i.e. compared with the stereotypically flamboyant Andalucians, say); concerned largely with self and immediate family rather than society at large; and, above all, obsessed with the notion of “face”.

It is a city of faces, or façades: because of a municipal edict that any building with the least pretension to age or artistic merit must be preserved, you will often pass what appear to be Hollywood film sets — impressive Art Deco frontispieces propped up by vertical girders in a vacant lot.

In short, empty shells, waiting for the rest of the demolished edifice to fill them up. Therefore large tracts in the centre of town look as if they are unchanged since the turn of the 20th century, at least, whereas in fact, the bits that people live and work in probably date back only a few decades.

The most audacious example of nothing being quite what it seems is the annual Feria de Las Fallas, dubbed by travel agents the world over as “Europe’s biggest street party”.

The high-point of this raucus, brilliantly illuminated, fireworks-infested fiesta is the burning, on the climactic “Nit de Foc” of March 19, the birthday of San José, Mary Magdalene’s husband and the patron saint of carpenters, of hundreds of polystyrene-and-wood figures that have been a year in the making, and some of which may have cost millions of euros.

Cartoon-style tableaux poking fun at local politicians and international headline-makers, the latest trends and humankind’s folly and fallibility in general, they originated several centuries ago with the habit of carpenters — Valencia is famed for its furniture — spring-cleaning their workshops and whittling away their time by fashioning satirical statues from their off-cuts.

Creating these “fallas” keeps several hundred specialist sculptors in year-round business, but by dawn on March 20, when all their work has been incinerated, the only evidence that it once existed is the photographs in the morning papers. And the streets are as free of revellers as they are once again full of traffic — all traces of the week-long bacchanalia having been hosed away, until next year.

So the Valencianos are experts in the art of smoke-and-mirrors. Which is why, with a health service cracking at the seams for lack of money and an education system that makes many in the Third World look quite smart, the autonomous provincial government has run itself into huge debt promoting feel-good displays of publicly funded extravagance that make the Beijing Olympics seem like an exercise in restrained patriotism.

Infrastructure for the America’s Cup yacht races was built to last for years, but with the future venue of the competition now grinding its way through the courts, it is beginning to resemble more of a white-elephant than a blue-riband event.

Last year’s inaugural Valencia Formula One Grand Prix was only saved at the 11th hour by City Hall digging deep into its reserves to mollify an apparently fuming Bernie Ecclestone (hell hath no fury like a motoring magnate who fears he won’t get paid).

And now there are allegations that the much-ballyhooed Papal visit of Benedict XVI in 2006 was an elaborate scam, with inflated TV-rights money finding its way into various political pockets.

The latest example of putting the showboating cart in front of the practical horse is Valencia’s venerable bullring, owned (on behalf of a hospital charity) by the city authorities, who auction off the rights to run it every three-to-five years.

Having sacked the incumbent, who had managed to make money despite a crippling million-euros annual rental by filling the plaza with profitable non-taurine activities (at the expense of the quality of corridas he actually staged, it is said), bids have been accepted from a handful of would-be promoters at a fraction of the previous hire-fee.

Why? Because the “Diputacion”, or department responsible, wants the new man to concoct a series of costly, star-studded bills for next year’s Fallas Feria in the hope of attracting a satellite TV channel to cover the 10 or so corridas in their entirety — thus, it is argued, further raising Valencia’s tourism profile, at least in the eyes of bulls-lovers (of which there are a surprising number, both in Spain itself, the south of France, Portugal and Latin America).

What the rest of the world thinks of us is far more important than any reality on the ground.

Isn’t that a perfect definition of the Chinese concept of “face”?

Bill Cranfield can be reached at [email protected]