Valencia, Spain
During the wee hours of the festival, fireworks light up a falla - a kind of float - in a Valencia plaza. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
A woman and her baby take part in the Ofrenda de Flores, or flower offering at the Plaza de la Virgen (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
Thousands of people pack a main street leading to Valencia’s City Hall, where smoke rises from festival fireworks. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
The city’s Calle Sueca is ablaze in lights and the streets are lively during the annual event. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
Spanish matador Enrique Ponce is carried out of the ring after his bullfight during Las Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
Over two evenings, about 150,000 men, women and children including fallas commissions, their queens and courts joined the Ofrenda procession, bringing pink, red and white flowers to fashion the cloak of the Virgin, which stood 46 feet tall in Plaza de la Virgen in the heart of old Valencia. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
The plaza was a sea of flowers. Ornately costumed women wept and crossed themselves as they handed their bouquets to those decorating the floral cloak. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)
The fireworks, the hoopla, the bullfights were preludes to the main events the Ofrenda de Flores (flower offering) to Our Lady of the Forsaken, the patron saint of Valencia, and then La Crema, when the fallas are set ablaze. (Ramon Espinosa / For The Times)