Valencians Erotic

Valencians are the people of Spain's eastern coast. What holds them together is less ancestry than a civic identity built on a medieval kingdom, an irrigated plain and a language they still argue about. The Valencian Community covers the provinces of Castellón, Valencia and Alicante: orange groves, rice paddies around the Albufera lagoon and a heavily built resort coast, backed by dry limestone uplands. Most Valencians call themselves Spanish without any trouble. The regional attachment is still real, and it shows up in the kitchen, the festival calendar and the question of what to call their speech.

That speech is Valencian. Linguists classify it as a form of Catalan, the language settlers brought south after James I of Aragon took the city from its Muslim rulers in 1238. The official Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua accepts that it is the same language spoken in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. A movement called blaverisme, named for the blue band on the regional flag, rejects that view, and the fight over names and symbols turned violent during the transition to democracy. Nearly everyone also speaks Spanish, and a band of inland and far southern districts has been Spanish-speaking for centuries.

The Kingdom of Valencia kept its own laws, the Furs, inside the Crown of Aragon for more than four centuries. Its fifteenth century was a golden age that produced the poet Ausiàs March, the chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc and the Borja family of Xàtiva. Better known as the Borgias, they gave the Church two popes. Then came two blows. The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 took roughly a third of the kingdom's people, and after the defeat at Almansa in 1707 the Bourbon crown abolished the Furs. Valencians still quote the saying that evil coming from Almansa reaches everyone.

Water and fire run through ordinary life. For centuries the Tribunal de les Aigües has settled irrigation disputes on the Valencia plain. It meets every Thursday at noon outside a door of the cathedral and gives its rulings aloud, in Valencian. Each March the capital puts up satirical sculptures for the Fallas and burns nearly all of them on the night of Saint Joseph. The daily mascletà, a burst of firecrackers, is judged by the crowd on rhythm and sheer force. Alcoi stages battles between Moors and Christians, Algemesí builds human towers, and most towns keep an amateur wind band. Catholic devotion runs through the festivals, even for Valencians who skip Mass. During the Fallas, crowds carry armloads of flowers to cover a towering image of the Virgin of the Forsaken, the city's patron saint. Paella began as a farmworkers' meal cooked over a wood fire, and arguing about what belongs in it is a tradition of its own.