Dragon puppet 'Quimera' to parade through Puerto de Sagunto this Wednesday
The street show Quimera, featuring a six-metre-tall dragon puppet, will parade through Avenida 9 d'Octubre in Puerto de Sagunto this Wednesday, 19 August, as part of the Sagunt a Escena festival's Off Romà programme.
A dragon puppet six metres tall, twelve metres long and weighing close to 1,500 kilograms will move through part of Avenida 9 d'Octubre in Puerto de Sagunto (coastal district) this Wednesday, 19 August. This is Quimera, a travelling street-theatre show by the company La Fam, arriving in Sagunto as part of Off Romà, the outdoor programme that runs alongside the Sagunt a Escena festival every summer.
The show, suitable for all audiences, will run from 9pm to 10pm. It will start at the roundabout near the Alameda and move along Avenida 9 d'Octubre to the roundabout by the former AHM management building (which connects to Virgen de los Dolores and Jerónimo Roure streets), where the route turns back to the starting point. There, at the Alameda, the show will end with a fireworks display.
The jointed puppet that brings Quimera to life is built from iron, leather and wood, and is operated live by four performers who make the creature breathe fire, blow smoke from its nose, open and close its eyes, move its head and neck, spread its wings, swing its tail and walk on its huge legs. Through this struggle between the beast and those trying to control it, the show raises a question that runs through the whole performance: what happens when humans fail to control what they have created.
The creature that gives the show its name comes from Greek mythology. According to Spain's Royal Academy dictionary, a "quimera" (chimera) is a mythical monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a dragon's tail that breathed fire. The daughter of Typhon and Echidna, the original Chimera roamed Asia Minor terrorising local populations and devouring those who opposed it, until the hero Bellerophon defeated it with the help of the winged horse Pegasus, according to the myth.
The format of the show — a fire-breathing dragon operated in the middle of the street, ending with fireworks — connects with a much broader festive tradition well known in the Valencian region: the correfoc (literally "fire-run"), a Catalan-Valencian tradition descended from medieval "Ball de diables" (devil dances), documented as far back as the 12th century in Catalonia, in which fire creatures operated by performers, alongside fireworks, have become a central feature.
The fact that the show runs through Puerto de Sagunto, rather than the historic old town, is no accident in the festival's programming: Off Romà takes Sagunt a Escena's street shows outside the Roman Theatre grounds in the historic centre, bringing them instead to the port district, which has its own identity and its own urban rhythm. Avenida 9 d'Octubre, one of Puerto de Sagunto's main streets, becomes an improvised stage for an hour — something unusual outside the town's patron-saint festivities or the Moros y Cristianos celebrations (traditional reenactment festival).
Shows like Quimera, with its four live performers and a large jointed structure, usually take months of logistical preparation: designing and building the puppet, coordinating with the Municipal Police over traffic closures, and working with emergency services because of the fireworks used in an open space. That groundwork, invisible to an audience that only sees the one-hour show, is standard for this kind of large-scale street theatre, which is becoming more common in the summer cultural programmes of towns across the Valencian Community.
Choosing a neighbourhood with an industrial and port-city tradition for this kind of artistic event fits a wider trend in Puerto de Sagunto, where outdoor cultural events now share the summer with everyday life in the port district, offering leisure options that do not depend solely on the archaeological site in the historic centre.
Quimera's appearance also coincides with the peak beach season in Puerto de Sagunto, when the district draws more visitors than usual each summer. Scheduling a free midweek street show, rather than at the weekend, follows the same logic of spreading cultural events across the whole summer season instead of concentrating them only on the busiest tourist days — something the City Council has highlighted in previous editions of Off Romà.
To make set-up and take-down easier, the company will park its truck around 5pm near the pedestrian crossing that links the Alameda with the bus stop on Calle Trabajo, by the roundabout. Once the equipment is unloaded, the vehicle will move to a designated area on Avenida Adolfo Suárez until the show ends. Avenida 9 d'Octubre will be closed to traffic during the performance, and normal traffic will resume once everything is packed away. According to Ajuntament de Sagunt (Sagunto City Council), with additional background from Wikipedia on the Chimera of Greek mythology and the correfoc tradition.