Valencia, an insider’s perspective
Although it doesn’t have the world-renowned city cachet of Barcelona, Valencia does have reputation of being a great chill place to hang out for digital nomads. In particular, the family we met in Sarande had spent a month there and thoroughly enjoyed it. So, for our final two weeks in Spain, we happily found ourselves in Valencia - the birthplace of paella, oranges and so much more.
Despite our extensive traveling experience, we managed to be surprised when we landed in Valencia during their Semana Santa celebrations. They don’t mess around. Buildings get decorated, girls dress up in over the top dresses, and there are massive parades with people lining the streets. Everyone is out and about
And the city gets drenched in rose petals — it’s the streetcleaners’ favorite week
Locals later told us that Valencia is known for loud, lengthy and over-the-top religious festivals throughout the year. Besides Semana Santa, there is obviously Fallas. But then there’s a million more..too many to name.
In addition to its chill and delicious reputation, we were also drawn to Valencia’s spectacular beaches. Much like Copacabana in Rio, Playa de la Malva-Rossa in Valencia is a huge wide beautiful sandy beach that stretches for miles
A quiet moment on the beach
There is a lovely palm colonnade and promenade running alongside the Playa, with pleasant and entertaining installations along the way. They are perfect for pictures
Unfortunately, we were there too early (mid-May) to properly enjoy it as a beach. The wind here gets pretty brutal in May and it’s not quite hot enough for pleasant swims. In fact, according to the locals the wind doesn’t cease all year-round; of course, the wind is more pleasant in the heat of the summer. We hear that for the beach, June is best on balance…
Blown by the wind…
Also, don’t be fooled like I was — Valencia as a whole is not a beach town. Unless you are staying in the neighborhoods that run along the playa, the beach is at least a ten minute drive away, which turns into 20-30 minutes on public transport if you don’t have a car. Doable, but not the center of life for a big part of the city. More relevantly, walking around the rest of the city, you would never guess you were next to an ocean, much less a glorious beach like this. You might as well be a hundred miles from water.
Outside of its (lack of) beach attraction, we found Valencia is a great place to spend a few weeks or months. Like much of old Europe, it is built for communal living. Life takes place, not secreted away in the home, but in the cafes, restaurants, bars, plazzas, parks and other shared spaces. Check out this self-service common animal washing station - not an expected find! We offered to wash Alya there but she wasn’t in the mood
Valencia has been working on its communal spaces. During the last few decades, the city built a huge park on what was an old river bed, creating running and biking tracks, sculpture gardens, playgrounds and several stunning arts, science and entertainment centers
These stunning buildings house an opera, a performing arts center, a giant science museum, a stunning aquarium with a dolphin show, and a planetarium with beautiful movies. Masha and Alya enjoyed these a LOT. They still talk about the memory exhibit they saw at the science museum. These places are great for worldschooling or just hanging out with your kids. (p.s. Check out online combined tickets for discounts)
While these new constructions look perfect for postcards, there are also countless slightly less flashy places to enjoy. In the 90s, for example, someone thought it would be a great idea to build a playground in the shape of a gigantic Gulliver statue (as in the moment he was tied up by the liliputs) embedded in the ground
And they were right! There are lots of slides to enjoy and secret crevices to explore. Just watch out for the metal slides heating up in the summer.
In Ruzafa, just a block away from where we lived, was Parc Central. This has a beautiful garden, skate park, playgrounds, slides and even a bouldering wall!
A friend of mine connected me to his friends - recently moved to Valencia. We spent a great sunny day hanging out with them, learning a(n immigrant) resident’s perspective of the city. We saw a different, newer, part of Valencia, had a rooftop barbeque and even went to their local arcade which — though inhabiting an eerily shuttered mall — was vibrating with life. This was a much needed breath of social interaction with people we enjoyed, and a great way to experience the city differently.
Go Biking!
Another reason we had been looking forward to Valencia was that we heard it is a great place for biking. Not so much around the center — although there are rentals and a good amount of bike paths there — but specifically in the parks, near beaches and on the outskirts of the city. The whole area is completely flat, with several sets of trails stretching tens of miles into the countryside. And so, we took ourselves over to the beach neighborhood and embarked on a 4-hour adventure. Our bike rental — Santa MarcelitaBikes — gave us a map with a great 15-mile loop that took us to the end of the beach promenade, through the green farm-country feeding Valencia, past a ghostly wild-west looking town and finally back through different neighborhoods and down the longest straight path I had seen… since Seville. And lets not forget that along these paths, you come across little playgrounds, shops, paella restaurants and tempting fresh Horchata and ice cream cafes. Don’t mind if we do
If you take this route, keep in mind that the beach gets very (very) windy in the afternoon and the bike path along it is mostly exposed to the wind. But if you make it through, you get all the views and the path is super flat the whole way and so smooth that the bike basically propels itself — 20 km of perfect riding (except for the wind).
Across our two weeks in Valencia, our bike riding day — complete with laying on the beach, listening to the waves and the music, feeling the wind and sun on our skin, the smooth riding, eating the paella and drinking the horchata — was one of the most blissful experiences.
Our overall feeling after leaving Valencia was that we would really like to go back! It is a rather loud city overall, from their myriad of festivals complete with ear-splitting firecrackers, to parties lasting long into the night, to wide-spread construction, with brick-breaking hammers echoing in massive concrete courtyards. And yet it is also welcoming, green and supremely livable. It’s excellent bakeries, delicious restaurants, bustling coffee shops, and communal plazza-living and nightlife, all tucked in among leafy green streets make this a beautiful place to be. I hope we will return!
