valencia highlights

As I mentioned in my Valencia planning post, my weekend in Valencia was very vacation-y.  I ultimately decided on Valencia as opposed to any other destination (Scotland and Cordoba were also in the running) because it was easily accessible by AVE and had beach access.  We were on the beach in Santander, but we didn't bring bathing suits or beach gear as we expected it to be much colder!  Aside from walking along the shore in Santander, I hadn't been on a beach all summer, and to leave a summer in Spain without beach time seemed horrible!  Plus, Valencia was a city I hadn't been to and still offered sights to see and things to do.

Here were my highlights:

Free Walking Tour

I'm a huge fan of walking tours, and I also love the increasingly popular "free tour" concept.  You're expected to tip and to tip well, but you decide the price of the ticket or its value to you at the end of the tour.  I used Free Tours Valencia to book my tour the week prior, and they had an easy meet up point to lead tours through the city centre or "old town."  All destination guides for Spain always say "explore the city centre," but that overwhelms me because what exactly am I supposed to see?  The tour was the perfect way to orient myself with the city, see the most important sights, and learn fun facts and history about Valencia.  Plus, this group offered tours in Spanish and English, and as it was a vacation, after all, I opted for English and probably got much more out of it.  My guide's name was Amparo, and she was great! 

I left captions on the pictures below to take you on a tour of your own instead of explaining it all here.  Going on the free tour makes me want to seek out more of those on vacations in other places!

Our first stop was in a plaza where this stone is embedded in the ground. It talks about Valencia's foundation by the Romans in 137 BC! In the middle, you might notice "Valentia" spelled with a "t." This would have been the spelling in Latin, so after the mix of Latin and Arabic influence, the name has evolved to Valencia. 

This is a nice view of the plaza where we started our tour. You can find the cathedral and the fountain. 

The small red building is the narrowest building in Europe! There is one facade in Amsterdam that is more narrow, but Valencia wins narrowest building because in Amsterdam, the facade is fake and the building is actually a more normal width.  Historically, people paid for the dimension of the width of their building rather than the square meters, so this was the cheapest option!  Entire families rented each floor to live in.  Evidently the plaza that is below was notorious for smelling horribly, because it was a fish market, and also because the inhabitants of the apartments would dispose of their waste there too (which was normal, but the mix with the fish smell gave it a reputation!). 

To the right is the original cathedral of Valencia, and to the left (the reddish building) is the addition where bishops and such live and work.  The bridge connecting the two was originally created so that people of such religious status didn't have to walk the streets to get from building to building. 

This building is part of the market area and housed many shops.  It was a popular place for parents to abandon children that they could not afford to care for.  However, the only abandoned boys, because girls could be useful for making money in a variety of disturbing ways.  Boys weren't good for much, so parents would bring them here and tell them to wait patiently for the bird on the tower to drop the egg it carries in its mouth, for it is made of gold!  Then, in the busy market area, the boys would be distracted, and the parents could flee.  The proximity to shops meant that boys would almost always be taken in by a shop keeper who needed boys to help with their work.   

This is the market of Valencia.  There is a fish section and an "everything else" section.  I tried horchata and fartons here, which you can read about below.

Graffiti is everywhere in Spain, but in Valencia, the graffiti was more of actual street art. I liked this picture of a Valencian woman in a paella pan haha. 

This is one of the entrances to the cathedral, but it also is the oldest working "court" in Europe.  Each Thursday at 12 noon, farmers gather here to debate irrigation systems and water supply to their rice fields.  Paella is authentic to Valencia because Valencia's main agriculture product is rice.  While the court is a tourist attraction now, it is actually a real court, and decisions made there contribute to actual law for the autonomous Community of Valencia.  

Beach Time

Valencia is along the coast, but the city is actually off the water a ways.  It takes about 1.5 hours to walk to the actual beach area from the city centre.  Thankfully I learned this from the Along Dusty Roads blog beforehand. They recommended to stay in the city centre where everything else is, including the transit that easily moves you to the beach area.  Getting to the beach by bus or metro/tram is still about a 30-45 minute journey, but it beats walking in the heat in beach gear.  The Valencian beach area was more like American beaches than any other Spanish beach I've seen.  The coastline was almost never ending, and there was a board walk full of restaurants.  The water is beautiful and clean, and the beach area was very clean too.  It was definitely crowded, but I found a good spot on the "front row" to camp out for the afternoon, and it never felt too busy or loud.  I bought a book while in town, and even found an English section in a bookstore, so I was content there for four hours or so.  I was paranoid about getting burnt since I haven't gotten much sun this summer, but I actually did not burn at all and barely look like I got sun!

Jardín del Turia

Historically, there was a sizeable river (the Turia) that flowed through Valencia.  In the 1950s, the river flooded.  The city decided to divert the river around the city so it would never damage the city again, and now the actual river is channeled to the south and flows into the Mediterranean Sea.  Now, the old river bed is the largest city park in Europe and is full of playground areas, trails for bikers and pedestrians, tennis courts, soccer fields, skate parks, water features, and green space.  It is really cool to see the bridges that were kept in tact along the "river;" I believe there are 18 in total.  You are below the city, in a way, while in the park.  Rather than walk the park, I rented a bike!  My Valencia Pass offered discounts from several bike shops, so I picked one and rented a bike for two hours.  I rode the majority of length of the river park and went to the coast to see the beach, though I didn't have time to spend on the beach on Sunday.  Also at the coastal end of the park is the City of Arts and Sciences.  The City of Arts and Sciences is a collection of museums that is designed in a way that looks very futuristic.  The buildings look like space ships.  The museums there are just an aquarium, a science museum, and a IMAX dome theatre, so I didn't pay to go in, but I mostly wanted to see the architecture and iconic Valencian landmark!  

 

Ciutat Vella

The location of my hotel was really perfect, and I'm glad I learned to stay in the city rather than nearer to the beach.  I was just about 10 minutes walking outside of the ciutat vella, Valencia's "old town," so I found myself there a lot of the time!  In Spanish, ciutat vella would be ciudad bella, but Valencia speaks Valencian, which is a dialect of Catalan that is spoken in Barcelona.  Everyone speaks Spanish, too, but to preserve the history and tradition of the city, Valencian is prevalent on signs and such.  Beyond my walking tour, I also went to the Torres Serrano and Torres de Quart.  The towers historically would have been part of a wall around the city, but they remain as towers and landmarks now.  They also played a significant role in multiple wars, even as recently as the Spanish Civil War.  

Food

There are many signature foods unique to each city in Spain.  Though you can typically find any of the foods anywhere in Spain, the cities are very prideful of their foods.  Valencia is known for paella- but not just paella, real paella, they would say.  In addition, horchata, fartons, and agua de Valencia are popular and special to the area.  On my walking tour, we had a stop at the market in Valencia, and we had 15 minutes there to explore and try some different foods!  That's where I got a cup of horchata, which is a super sweet nut milk drink.  Rarely do I think Spanish food is too sweet (or too salty or too spicy or too anything regarding flavour haha), but I could barely drink my dixie cup of horchata.  Fartons are basically breadsticks glazed with sugar, almost like a donut but less sweet.  Valencians dip the fartons in horchata, and that was really the only way I could drink the whole horchata!  

My paella story was quite an ordeal that left me disappointed.  I found a highly recommended paella restaurant near my hotel to go to after my beach time on Saturday.  I went to look for the restaurant after that, knowing that it would be fun to also explore the neighbourhood were it's situated.  Remember that all of Spain is about to be on vacaciones? Well evidently for many local shop owners and restaurants in Valencia, that's already started, because they were closed for the month for "rest."  Can you imagine if our most popular tourist destinations just closed shops and restaurants for "rest" for a MONTH?  I found a new place that was open with affordably priced paella.  It was a total tourist stop, and the paella was mediocre at best and overpriced.  The Valencian paella is different because it traditionally doesn't include seafood and rather has chicken or rabbit.  I opted for chicken, but I think I prefer the paella with seafood that the rest of Spain makes.  After my paella incident, I found another hole-in-the-wall restaurant because I wanted to try Valencia's special drink, agua de Valencia, which is basically a mimosa.  Aside from those treats, I ate pretty cheaply the rest of my time; I brought a sandwich and snacks for my beach afternoon and grabbed Burger King before I got on my train back to Madrid.