The Carnival of Vinaròs falls forty days before Lent, in the flat gray heart of winter, which is precisely the point. When the light is thinnest and the fishing hardest, the town answers with color and noise. Its engine is the comparsas, the troupes, of which there are thirty-three, the largest numbering some five hundred people. Each troupe is led by a queen, and each queen designs and creates a costume so ambitious that its form is kept secret until the moment she reveals it. That secrecy is half the drama. Until the great presentation, no one outside the troupe knows what she will wear, and the unveiling of the queens is one of the festival's most anticipated nights. The scale is genuinely surprising for a place this size. Tens of thousands of costumes are stitched, glued, and guarded in the workshops of an ordinary fishing port through the darkest, coldest months of the year.

Carnival in Vinaròs has deeper roots than its modern spectacle suggests. The town archive traces it to 1871, when a masked ball raised fifty reales that were handed to the mayor as charity, a small, sociable act of generosity behind the masks. The tradition surfaced again during the years of the Second Spanish Republic, spontaneous and popular. Then, in 1939, as the Civil War ended and a new order settled over the country, the festivity was banned, part of a wider suppression of Carnival across Spain. But a celebration this stubborn does not die easily. It returned, grew, and in 2007 was formally recognized as a festivity of tourist interest for the Valencian Community, with ambitions to earn national standing. Demetrio Ayguals de Izco, the mayor who received that first charity in 1871, would recognize little of the spectacle the festival has become, yet the impulse behind it, generosity dressed up as revelry, has scarcely changed at all.

The calendar is a marathon of invented rituals. There is a flour battle and a costume competition for pets. There is a night when the whole town turns out in pajamas, and another given over to a fiercely contested karaoke showdown between troupes. Much of it unfolds at the Fóra Forat walk, where each comparsa builds a hut and throws open its doors for the nightly parties. The two great weekend parades send the troupes winding through a fixed circuit of the old streets in a river of costume and music. Day after day the town reinvents an excuse to dress up, and the ordinary rules of who does what, and when, and in what outfit, are cheerfully suspended.

It all ends where it must, at the water's edge. On the final Monday the celebration returns to the Town Hall, and then the Carnestoltes, the great wooden effigy who has presided over the whole affair, is carried out and burned. In the flames the town lets go of its license and turns, at least officially, toward the sobriety of Lent. But Vinaròs cannot quite wait a whole year for the next round. Each August it stages a Summer Carnival, complete with another presentation of the queens, so that visitors drawn by the beaches can glimpse what the town does best. The fire on the beach is a farewell, but never really a goodbye.