Sant Joan in Jávea: the night the beach catches fire

The wildest night of the year

Every town on this coast has one night when the usual rules take the evening off. In Jávea it is the night of 23 June — la nit de Sant Joan — when the beaches fill after dark with families, teenagers, firewood and a general conviction that the summer must be welcomed properly, which is to say with fire. It is ancient beneath the surface: a midsummer solstice rite that the church long ago baptised with St John's name without ever quite taming it. What survives is a party of genuine strangeness and charm — fire, sea and superstition in roughly equal parts, running until a sunrise that arrives indecently early. Towns across the Valencian coast all mark the night, but there is a strong argument that it belongs most naturally to places like Jávea, where the beach is the town's front room and everyone — grandmothers, teenagers, bemused newcomers — turns up to sit in it together.

The fogueres: fire, Valencian-style

The bonfire tradition — les fogueres — is the region's signature, and every town interprets it at its own scale. Down the coast in Alicante, whole satirical monuments are built over months specifically to be burned in one operatic night; in Jávea the custom stays closer to its pagan roots and is the better for it: bonfires on the sand, neighbourhood fires in the old town's squares in the run-up to the night itself, children collecting scrap wood for weeks with the focus of professionals, and the symbolic burning of old junk and old baggage, literal and otherwise. Because that is the heart of it — the fire is a purge. You feed it what you want rid of: old exam notes are the classic offering, hurled in by students to loud approval, but written regrets, dead paperwork and the general debris of the year all qualify. The flames take it, the sea seals it, and you start the summer lighter than you entered it.

The night by the numbers

The shape of the evening, in figures — though nobody on the beach is counting anything except waves.

Midnight: the sea does its part

As midnight approaches, the entire beach population drifts to the waterline — you can feel the pull, like a tide running through the crowd — and at twelve the sea fills with people jumping waves: seven of them, by firm tradition, for luck, love or a clean slate depending on who is explaining it. Some wash their faces in the sea for beauty in the year ahead, some go in backwards so the old year cannot follow them, some write a wish and let the water take it, and some simply go in because everyone else has and the shrieking is contagious. The folklore is a glorious jumble of pre-Christian solstice magic and Mediterranean improvisation, and absolutely nobody stands on the sand analysing it — the analysis is for the following morning, over churros. The water in late June is on the friendly side of 22 degrees, so midnight swimming has been endorsed by warmer authorities than superstition.

The fire-jumping and the small print

The other headline ritual is leaping the bonfire — traditionally three times as the flames die down, to burn off the year's bad luck. Watch the locals: nobody jumps a roaring fire. They wait for embers, they jump with the wind at their backs, and they keep the heroics modest because the point is renewal, not casualty figures. Every year the emergency services issue the same patient advice, and every year almost everyone follows it.

• Jump embers, never flames — patience is part of the ritual
• Seven waves at midnight; count them honestly
• Burn something you are glad to be rid of — paper, not plastics
• Take everything else home; the beach at dawn is the town's living room

Fire runs and pyrotechnics

Around Sant Joan and on through the summer fiesta season, the Valencian love of gunpowder gets its fullest expression — this is, after all, the region that treats pyrotechnics as a branch of the performing arts and daytime noise as a legitimate firework genre. Where fire runs — correfocs-style events, with costumed devils showering the street in sparks while drummers hammer out something primal behind them — are held, they are unforgettable: a moving thundercloud of noise and fire that participants, astonishingly, dance underneath on purpose. Programmes vary from year to year, so check the town's fiesta schedule rather than assuming; when one runs, the etiquette is well established. Spectators in the splash zone wear cotton layers, hats and closed shoes, cover their ears, and leave the good jacket and the synthetic anorak at home. The prudent watch from a doorway with a drink; the committed dance in the sparks and come home smelling gloriously of sulphur. Both groups report an excellent evening.

How to keep your eyebrows

A practical word, offered with affection. The night involves open fires, fireworks in amateur hands and a great deal of enthusiasm, and yet it works — because the crowd is mostly families who have done this every year of their lives. Copy them: keep children upwind of fires, admire other people's rockets from a distance, and remember the sand hides embers long after the flames are gone.

How to do it like a local

Arrive in the evening with a group, a cool-box and firewood if you are making your own fire where fires are permitted that year — the town announces the rules and designated zones each June, and following them is part of being welcome. Claim your patch of sand early, because the beach fills like a stadium. Eat long and late on the sand: coca and empanadillas from the bakery, watermelon by the half, things grilled optimistically over driftwood, and whatever the neighbouring fire insists you try. Drift between fires, because visiting is half the culture and nobody guards their flames jealously tonight. Jump your waves at twelve, jump your embers after, and then commit to the real test: staying awake. The shortest night rewards those who last it, and judges nobody who does not.

The sunrise swim

The night's true finish line comes at first light, around half past six, when the survivors — salt-crusted, smoke-scented, improbably cheerful — walk into a flat pink sea for the first swim of summer proper. It is the kind of moment that converts people permanently to this coast: the year's shortest night dissolving into its longest day, with the Montgó turning rose-gold behind the bay.

You have not started a Jávea summer until you have watched it arrive from the water.

A Duanes de la Mar veteran of many Sant Joan sunrises

The morning after

By mid-morning on the 24th — St John's Day itself, and a name day that half the coast's Joans, Juanes and Juanas celebrate with lunches of their own — the town runs a collective slow start. The beaches are cleaned with a speed that borders on the miraculous, the churros queue reaches philosophical lengths, and everyone agrees, as they do every single year, that they are too old for this and will absolutely be doing it again next June. Summer, at this point, is officially open: the solstice has been jumped, splashed and burned into place, and the town has ten weeks of high season ahead of it.