Moon in Valencia Today — Waning Gibbous

Moon in Valencia — Did You Know?

• ·Valencia's Las Fallas festival — a UNESCO Intangible Heritage spectacle of giant papier-mâché sculptures that are burned on the night of March 19th — is timed within the Catholic lunisolar calendar to St. Joseph's Day, which always falls near the spring equinox when the new or crescent moon appears over the bonfires; the festival's traditional mascletà (firecracker salvo) has been held at precisely 2:00 pm daily since 1901 with timing confirmed by the city's clocktower, which was originally set by lunar observation.
• ·Valencia sits on the Costa del Azahar directly facing the Mediterranean Sea, with the Albufera lagoon — a 21 km² freshwater lake separated from the sea by a narrow sandbar — lying just south of the city; from the Gola del Pujol viewpoint on the Albufera's edge, the full moon rises over the Mediterranean to the east and reflects simultaneously in the lagoon's mirror-flat surface, just meters from the open sea, creating a double reflection visible from the sandbar.
• ·At latitude 39.5° N, Valencia occupies a favored Mediterranean position; in winter the full moon arcs through the southern sky, reaching a maximum altitude of approximately 74° — high enough to illuminate the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia and the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias complex for almost the entire winter night, a feature that the complex's architects Santiago Calatrava explicitly considered in the buildings' white-concrete reflective design.