I nearly missed the lot: the fallas; the parades; the music; the mascletas; the fireworks over Paseo de la Alameda, each display more "spectacular" and later than the night before; the bunuelos (small pieces of unsweetened dough) dunked in thick chocolate at 2 a.m. A fiesta for hearty souls who scorn sleep.
"Everything in Valencia is 150 per cent overbooked," said Jose Ferri from the Tourist Board on March 14th, but, the saint, he found me a hotel.
A hotel in a city in a time-warp. Valencia in Fallas Week, its roads decked with coloured lights that made Regent Street look like a 40-watt bulb in a poor man's bed-sit, seemed to be re-running Christmas.
The roots of the Fallas Festival are medieval. Every March, Valencian craftsmen would scorch winter's tail and nudge in the spring by burning their parots. No! Forget Monty Python! Parots with one r - crude stands for lamps and candles to illuminate the dark months.
Come March 19th, the feast of St Joseph, the parots were no longer needed. Apprentices dressed them in cast-offs, burnt them in the street and partied. Falla (say it fayah) means celebratory bonfire, beacon, torch.
But the whole of Spain doesn't pour into Valencia in March to watch overgrown candlesticks torched. No, your 21st-century falla is a spunky work of sophisticated popular art in painted papiermache and wood, sometimes towering 60 feet above you. Around the base are comically ridiculous figurines - the ninots. Schmaltz-free Disney - hm, tricky that - Velasquez skin tones, Daumier caricature and the whackiness of Terry Gilliam. There's a Rabelaisian mixture of all those.
Dreamed up by a neighbourhood committee, created by a falla artist, each one is "planted" (the planta) at its site at midnight on March 15th. Children's fallas are set up much earlier (8 a.m.). All compete for prizes. And survival!
Many themes are satirical. Under Franco, the satire was often a coded attack on the regime. Current fallas are also enigmatic, but the targets are less opaque. Recently, one depicted English royalty as mad cows.
This year, inevitably, the millennium was ubiquitous. Ninot Simpsons and Flintstones shared a spot. My favourite was Falla Mercat where a baby, in nappies marked "www.", brandished a CD and straddled his tiny square like a colossus.
The fiesta hots up rapidly after the planta parades, music, excellent tapas, paella, local tintos (red wines), bullfights - and those fireworks.
Each day at 2 p.m. in Plaza Ayuntamiento (City Hall Square) the air bombs explode. It's la Mascleta, from the Valencian for male - mascle. These pyrotechnicians are masters of their craft. Each day's mascleta is more dramatic than the previous. But can they make the next go with an even bigger bang? They can!
Buildings shake. Blasts of air hit you like Atlantic rollers. Smoke veils the square. The crowd - there must have been more than 100,000 on the last day - roars as if it had won the World Cup. Kids rush to pick up souvenir fragments and the fizz-kids in safety hats are mobbed like soccer stars. Everyone feels absurdly happy - well, we did. So this is catharsis!
If pageant and music are more your style, there are seamless parades of fallas groups in regional costume. The women especially are glorious to behold, even the ones puffing cigarettes. Their dresses of damask, brocade and the flowered silk called espolin must have been woven out of last night's threads of fire. What a relief my daughters, Camille and Juliet, were not there demanding: "Why can't we have dresses like those?"
The parades and bands playing boleros, pasadobles, rumbas and jazzy marches seem - like everything in this Valencian time-twister - to start at dawn and end after midnight. There are parades to collect prizes, parades to offer flowers to the Virgin, parades to - parade! But those flowers! They are woven into the frame of Our Lady of the Forsaken to create her robe as she towers benignly over the throng.
And after midnight - more fireworks! But I've almost used up my superlatives. You'll simply have to see them.
Finally on March 19th - the Crema, or burning of the fallas. OK, so it rained. A year's work went up in flames, but we got rained on, rained on in Spain. Singing in the Rain echoed around the streets. Crowds huddled under brollies or in doorways to watch various fallas - almost 700 in all - torched in a fiery sacrifice to artistic optimism - as if to say: "They'll be even more stunning next year."
Thanks to St Jose of the Regional Tourist Board, my friends and I saw the official city falla - an enormous angel ushering a Valencia lady into the millennium - in front of the Ayuntamiento blaze up from a balcony of the Hotel Melia. The great Miltonic angel fell in flames at 1 a.m. on March 20th, 2000 AD.
There was nothing left but to down an Irish coffee or two in the Aroma cafe opposite. There we met Rainer from Germany: "I was first here with my Spanish girlfriend," he said. "That didn't last, but this did."
Then he ended his 23rd Fallas Festival with a late, late night cap and the announcement: "First thing tomorrow, I book for next year!"
Spanish Festivals
April 16th-21st: Seville April Fair: Horsemanship, cavalcades, flamenco.
April 22nd-24th, Moors and Christians Festival, Alcoy (Alicante): parades, mock battles and fireworks.
Holy Week, (Seville) 50 brotherhoods parade with decorated statues of the Virgin.
May 6th-19th, Cordoba Patio Festival. Horse-drawn coach parades; millions of flowers decorating the city.
May 12th-19th, Jerez de la Frontera, 13th-century Horse Fair. Horsemanship, traditional singing and dancing in Gonzalez Park (Jerez, Cadiz).
June 2nd, Corpus Christi, Toledo - Parades of Ecclesiastical Knights in red, blue, white and green. Sitges (Barcelona) Flowers, flowers everywhere.
June 24th-29th, Alicante Bonfires of St Juan: flower battles, fireworks, and burning of satirical effigies.
July 6th-14th, San Fermin (Pamplona) (Hemingway's Fiesta).
Sept 20th-26th,Rioja Grape Harvest Festival (Logrono) Wine, music, dancing, bullfights . . . and more wine!