The Burn to Rebirth

Valencia, Spain During Fallas

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Ernest Hemingway first arrived in Valencia in the summer of 1925, following bullfighting legend Cayetano Ordóñez from Pamplona, with the intent to keep “the party going,” so to speak. He found himself in the center of the city at the Hotel Reina Victoria, with a balcony that gave him a panorama of the bustling town below. He was enamored. “In Valencia, it’s damned stupendous at the beach or in the city to eat a melon washed down with a real cold jug of beer,” he wrote, and in that spirit, began his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, on that same balcony. Hemingway, the master of short prose and vivid precision, was nevertheless possessed with an eye for the grand view, a sweeping insight regarding his time in Spain. So immersed in the atmosphere, he wrote while absorbing the surrounding cultural noise. I arrived in Valencia during the 19-day Fallas festival, culminating in what I’d define as a riveting travel week, where I couldn’t help but dream of my favorite writer, his history, and imagining where he might have luxuriated over a cold beer on a warm Valencian evening.

I, too, stayed at the Hotel Reina Victoria, overlooking Plaça de l’Ajuntament and the main Fallas sculpture of the great Valencian street artist,