Sagunt has decided to force the issue over who guards the Intangible Heritage listing. The Federació Junta Fallera de Sagunt (FJFS) and the city council have joined forces to demand "plural and territorial representation" for the Fallas, and on Thursday they take an institutional declaration to the full council which, on a proposal from the Camp de Morvedre falla movement, is addressed squarely at Valencia city council.

The text follows Valencia's decision to leave the Associació d'Estudis Fallers (ADEF) out of the UNESCO monitoring committee — the body that, in practice, wrote the file UNESCO approved on 30 November 2016 and which the organisation itself cites among the festival's safeguarding bodies. The declaration has guaranteed backing from every party in the chamber.

What it asks for

The motions include restoring real territorial representation for the federations and local falla boards of all three provinces on that committee. They also call for falleros, artists, pyrotechnicians, musicians, researchers and cultural bodies to be given seats. And they set a procedural condition: any change to the committee must follow "public, justified and verifiable criteria", in line with good-governance principles.

The underlying argument is UNESCO's own principle that the community which carries the heritage must take part in managing it. "The Fallas belong to every town that celebrates them, to every person who makes them possible, and their representation has to reflect all of that diversity," the declaration reads.

The demand does not stop in Valencia. The text also asks the regional government to revive work on an official Valencian-wide falla body able to bring together local boards and federations and offer a single, plural and balanced voice.

A widening front

Sagunt joins the comarca-level voices that had already asked for a say in safeguarding the festival, and does so weeks before the tenth anniversary of the listing. The text will be defended in the chamber with FJFS president Aitor Muñoz among its backers, and it sketches a common front that is awkward for María José Catalá's government: the festival, they argue, does not belong to one city but to towns across Valencia, Alicante and Castellón.

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