There are two theories about Fallas’ origins.

The first one is that the festival is a descendant of pre-Christian spring celebrations.

According to the second one, carpenters in the city used to celebrate their patron saint (Saint Joseph) by burning unused wood outside their workshops.

To know more about these two theories, you can check the relevant section of our article.

Yes, Fallas was suspended four times over the course of its history (that we know of). The festival got suspended once in 1886 for a falleros protest, once in 1898 because of the Spanish-American War, again between 1937 and 1939 because of the Spanish Civil War, and finally in 2020 because of COVID-19.

There are quite a few early written references to Fallas, most of them dating back to the 1700s and 1800s. However, the earliest is from Don Rafael Solaz in his 1963 manuscript. There, he references the many fallas set up in the city.

In 1901 the City Council first started giving out prizes to the best fallas, although early non-institutionalised versions of the prize were present before that.

A tren fallero is a tourist train line carrying visitors to Valencia on the occasion of the festival. The tren fallero was active between 1927 and 1974.

Fallas is an ever-evolving event, many of its traditions get abandoned or brought back continuously - suffice it to say that some were brought back as recently as 2016 and 2022.

However, we can generalise and say that the festival took on the form most similar to what we know today in the last two decades of the 1900s.