Faura backs local pilota player Àngela Abad in the Copa Caixa Popular
In Faura, a municipality in the Camp de Morvedre district, the town council is backing local pilota (Valencian handball) player Àngela Abad, who will compete alongside Marta Muedra in the women's Copa Caixa Popular raspall tournament.
Faura town council, in the Camp de Morvedre district, and the Federació de Pilota Valenciana (Valencian Pilota Federation) have signed a partnership agreement to support local player Àngela Abad in the next edition of the Copa Caixa Popular women's raspall Pro 2 tournament. Abad will play alongside Marta Muedra, from the nearby town of Pobla de Farnals, and will carry Faura's name on her shirt throughout the competition.
Raspall is one of the best-known styles of pilota valenciana (Valencian handball, a traditional bare-hand ball sport). Unlike other styles where the ball is always played in the air, raspall lets players also strike it low, near the ground, combining two signature moves: one that makes the ball roll along the floor, and another that lifts it back up to keep the point going. That mix of shots calls for different skills than other categories and is part of why the style draws such a following among fans. The two signature strokes carry their own names in Valencian: 'raspar', the low stroke that sends the ball skimming along the floor, and 'enganxar', which lifts it back into the air so a rally can continue. Both terms have stayed part of pilota vocabulary since raspall took its current shape in the region's trinquets — the traditional walled courts where the sport is played, long and narrow, enclosed on three sides, with spectators watching from raised galleries along the fourth.
Faura's mayor, Consol Duran, praised Abad's career and her rising profile within women's pilota valenciana, stressing the council's commitment to its local athletes. Duran also noted that women's categories are steadily gaining more space within this traditional sport, and recalled that Abad started out at Club de Pilota Faura before going on to compete both across the Valencian Community and at European events.
The council's support for Abad builds on existing local roots: Faura has its own pilota tradition, which includes among its historic figures the player Álvaro Navarro Serra, known as 'Álvaro', and the sport remains part of the town's traditional August patron-saint festivities. Abad's career adds to a local following that stretches back generations, one the council says it wants to keep in the spotlight.
The tournament Abad will play in is the fifth edition of the women's Copa Caixa Popular raspall, which aims to build up women's presence in the top events of Valencian pilota. The competition was officially presented on 7 September at the Estadi Ciutat de València (the city of Valencia's stadium), an event that also unveiled the 19th edition of the Copa Caixa Popular escala i corda and the 12th edition of the men's raspall tournament. At the presentation, Abad was accompanied by Faura's deputy mayor, Benito García, and its Education Councillor, Sílvia Broch, who conveyed the council's institutional backing as she takes on this new sporting challenge.
The backing for Abad fits a wider trend across the Camp de Morvedre district, where clubs and town councils have spent recent years pushing to raise the profile of women's sport, from pilota to disciplines such as weightlifting. Beyond Faura, several other towns in the district are showing the same interest in promoting their own sporting talent, in categories where women's participation has grown strongly in recent seasons. In nearby Sagunto itself, Club Halterofilia Sagunto has built a reputation for putting women's weightlifting in the spotlight, part of the same comarca-wide shift toward showcasing female athletes who once had far less visibility in traditional sports. Exhibition pilota matches are also a fixture of patron-saint festivities in several Camp de Morvedre towns each summer, a tradition that keeps the sport visible to new generations even in municipalities without a permanent trinquet.
For a town the size of Faura, having its own athlete competing at the top level of women's pilota valenciana offers a form of visibility that goes beyond sport itself: the town's name travels with Abad to every trinquet (traditional pilota court) she plays in, both inside and outside the Valencian Community. The agreement signed with the Federació de Pilota Valenciana also cements an institutional relationship the council hopes to keep going in future seasons, in line with the wider push behind women's sport across the Camp de Morvedre district. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia.