The heart of the festival is the romeria, held on the first Sunday. It begins early, the pilgrims setting out from the centre and threading north through the streets before the route turns onto rural paths climbing toward the Mary Magdalene chapel. Everyone carries a cane, a reminder of the walking staffs their ancestors once needed to cross this ground. Halfway up, tradition demands a pause at the Sant Roc de Canet chapel for a snack and a prayer. When the pilgrims finally reach the hilltop, bells ring, a thunderous mascletà announces their arrival, ring-shaped pretzels called rotllos are handed round, and an enormous paella is shared out after Mass beside the ruins of the old Castle of Fadrell.

The strangest and most beautiful symbols of the Magdalena are the gaiatas - tall festive monuments, some nearly twenty feet high, that one of the festival's founders defined perfectly as "a burst of light, with no fire or smoke." They are not floats or effigies but sculptures of pure illumination, and their shape is no accident: they recall the lanterns the early townspeople carried to find their way across the marshy plain at night. The city divides into nineteen districts for the festival, each fielding its own gaiata, and when they are all lit at once and judged in competition, the connection becomes clear. A town that once needed lanterns to cross the dark now builds monuments out of light to remember it.

Between its solemn moments, the Magdalena is gloriously loud. It opens at noon with fireworks whose number counts the years since the festival began, followed by a mascletà - a coordinated firecracker barrage, ten to fifteen deafening minutes of rhythm you feel in your chest more than hear. The great opening parade sends costumed companies through the streets reenacting the city's past as Moors, Christians, Jews, and pirates. After dark, El Fadrí bell tower blazes with pyrotechnics, the Nit Màgica fire show lights up the night, and daily mascletàs and firework runs keep the smoke drifting over the plain for more than a week.

The festival winds toward its close with the Offering of Flowers to Our Lady of Lledó, the city's patron, when carnations brought by thousands of residents are woven into a floral tapestry. Then comes the grand finale on Laetare Sunday: a final pyrotechnic run through the centre, the boldest onlookers sprinting just ahead of the fireworks. At the end, from the balcony of City Hall, the festival queens cry out to the crowd below in old Valencian - "Magdalena!" - and the square roars back "Vítol!" With that exchange the year's festivities formally end and the countdown to the next begins. It is little wonder Spain declared the Magdalena a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest in 2010.

There is a bookkeeping quality to the Magdalena that reveals how seriously Castellón takes its own history. The opening fireworks are counted out to match the number of years since the modern festival began in 1945; the pilgrimage retraces a move dated precisely to 1251; a floral wreath is laid each year at the monument to King James I, honoured as the grandfather of the city. Because the whole celebration is pinned to the third Saturday of Lent, its dates drift across March from one year to the next, chased annually by calendars and almanacs that calculate exactly when it will fall. For nine days the town becomes a living memory of its own founding - and then, with a single shouted word from a balcony, it resets the clock and begins the wait for next spring.