By Rafe Calder
In late August 2026, Madrid reached 39°C. The Associated Press, in a story carried by several outlets, says fans turned up on the metro, at concerts and at festivals, carried by people of every age. The story behind the fan runs through Valencia.
A fan that came from far away
The AP story says folding fans reached Europe through Portuguese trade with Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that historians believe they began in Japan between the sixth and ninth centuries. It says Spain then developed its own taste and its own industry, with Madrid an important centre. It adds that by the eighteenth century Valencia had emerged as the Spanish fan-making capital. Printing, the story says, made fan leaves cheap to produce in the 1700s.
A second AP version notes that by the middle of the seventeenth century the painter Diego Velázquez had painted a woman with a fan.
The language of the fan
AP says that by the 1800s Spanish aristocratic women used the fan to express flirtation, interest or disapproval without words, a code it calls the language of the fan. It says the fan later travelled to Latin America, where nineteenth-century flamenco dancers took it up. We have not checked the code itself, and we do not describe any gestures.
Aldaia, the centre
The municipality of Aldaia, in its own guide to the fan-makers’ route, says the craft has fifteenth-century roots, when royalty and nobles sought Valencian fans. It says the eighteenth century brought institutional recognition with the creation of a royal fan factory, and that in the nineteenth century Valencia and its surroundings held national production. In the twentieth, it says, Aldaia became the dominant municipality. The same guide names other fan-making towns: Godella, Xirivella, Chiva, Alaquàs, Burjassot and Quart de Poblet.
The guide is a promotional document from the town itself. It says about 30 companies are active today, many under a shared quality brand, and that the guild of master fan-makers of Valencia has its seat in Aldaia and has existed for over 300 years. It also calls Aldaia and Valencia the only European region that still keeps the craft alive. We treat that as the town’s claim and have not checked it.
A local blog on the town’s fan museum, MUPA, gives the guild’s formation as the eighteenth century and calls Aldaia the cradle of the fan, with workshops across the surrounding towns of l’Horta. The two accounts are consistent with each other, and we have not seen a third.
Many hands, one fan
According to the Aldaia guide, a single fan passes through many specialists: rib makers, fretsaw cutters, engravers, painters, lacquerers, polishers, fabric workers, embroiderers and assemblers. A master coordinates the work and completes the piece.
The Museo de Pontevedra’s catalogue note on its fan collection names the parts. The leaf is called the país. The sticks are varillas, which in the museum’s historical pieces are made of ivory, bone, mother-of-pearl, wood or tortoiseshell. The same note lists the leaf and decoration materials: chromolithographed paper, silk, vellum, lacquer, embroidery, gilding, openwork carving and pointillé. The AP story names wood, mother-of-pearl and hand-painted floral patterns.
A nineteenth-century factory town
An academic review in the journal Datatextil, on a museum catalogue of one collection, gives a picture of the trade in the 1800s. It says a lithographer named José Colomina Arquer, who lived from 1809 to 1875, built a fan business with factories in Valencia, Seville and Cádiz, and later received a marquisate and royal-supplier status. When he set up in 1840, it says, the cristino style dominated, with short bases of ivory, bone or shell and backings of paper and kidskin. Mechanisation in the middle of the century allowed mass production and brought the isabelino style.
The same review says Valencia had 14 documented factories in 1861, and in 1875 had 17 factories and 24 fan-makers. It adds that fans grew in size until the “great pericón” at the century’s end, in versions for display, mourning or daily use. The collection it covers holds 93 fans. The Pontevedra note agrees on the pericón and places it between 1874 and the 1920s.
Fashion, as the museum catalogue sees it
The Pontevedra note gives a short fashion timeline. It says that in the 1780s and 1790s French Bourbon influence at court meant fans with richly carved and gilded sticks and leaves made of rich fabrics or vellum, painted and set with gems. Around 1800 the Empire style brought finer sticks with delicate openwork and plant decoration. After the war of independence that began in 1808, it says, English and Dutch fans gained ground, and in the 1820s and 1830s smaller fans came in, with narrow straight sticks and chromolithographed paper leaves. Under Isabel II, in the 1850s and 1860s, fans grew larger, with wider carved sticks.
The museum
The local blog says the Museu del Palmito de Aldaia, which it calls Spain’s first fan museum, opened on 28 March 2015 in the Casa de la Llotgeta. It says more than 300 fans are on display from a collection of about 700 to 800, dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and after. It also reports that the museum lost about 20 per cent of its collection in the severe flooding of 29 October 2024. We have not checked the museum’s current state or hours.
What we left out
AP’s coverage names a Madrid fan shop and gives prices. We have left both out. The Pontevedra note mentions fashions inspired by East Asian designs. We have left that out as outside our scope.
What it means for a buyer
Our reading is that a fan is a layered object: sticks, leaf, decoration and assembly, each by a different hand. Ask who made which part, and from what. If a seller cannot say, treat any claim of “handmade” with care.
Where sources differ, we show each: Valencia’s rise (fifteenth-century roots, eighteenth-century capital), and the guild’s age (the eighteenth century, and over 300 years).
Roam first. Shop later.