🇪🇸 Spain · Catalonia and the Levante
Valencia is one of those cities that has everything and still manages to stay affordable and easy-going. Spain's third city, laid out beside the Mediterranean on a plain of market gardens and rice fields, it combines a medieval old town of golden stone, the futuristic architecture of the City of Arts and Sciences, kilometres of city beach and a food culture that gave the world one of its most famous dishes: paella, which was born right here, in the rice fields of the Albufera.
Its great modern trademark is the City of Arts and Sciences complex, the spectacular ensemble of white forms designed by the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, with its Oceanogràfic aquarium (the largest in Europe), the Hemisfèric planetarium and the Science Museum. But Valencia is much more: the Gothic Lonja de la Seda, a UNESCO World Heritage site; the bustling Modernista Central Market; the cathedral with its tower, the Miguelete; the maze of the Carmen quarter; and, above all, the Turia Gardens, a nine-kilometre park snaking along the old river bed after the great flood of 1957.
This guide walks through the essentials of Valencia with a practical and warm eye: how to organise a visit to the Oceanogràfic and the City of Arts, what to see in the old town, how to get to the Albufera for the real paella, where to hit the sand at Malvarrosa, how to get around by metro and what dates to bear in mind if you dream of experiencing Las Fallas. Valencia is bright, relaxed and full of flavour: one of the best destinations in Spain for a good time without rushing.
Valencia was founded by Rome in 138 BC under the name Valentia Edetanorum, as a colony to settle discharged soldiers after the wars against Viriathus and the Lusitanians. After Roman and Visigothic centuries, in 714 it passed into Muslim hands and, under the name Balansiya, became one of the most prosperous cities of al-Ándalus, with its market gardens watered by irrigation channels that still work today. In 1094 it was taken by Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, who governed it until his death. The definitive conquest came on 9 October 1238, when King James I of Aragón entered the city and granted it charters of its own, giving rise to the Kingdom of Valencia. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were its Golden Age, when the silk trade made it rich and the dazzling Gothic Lonja was built. In the early modern period the city lost weight, until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries modernised it. On 14 October 1957 a brutal flood of the Turia left dozens dead and devastated the city; the response was to divert the river along a new channel to the south (the Plan Sur) and turn the old bed into the great Turia Gardens that define Valencia today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mediterranean face of Spain: the counties born out of the Marca Hispanica, the Crown of Aragón that expanded across the Mediterranean, the Catalan language, the industry that made Barcelona a powerhouse and the memory of 1714.
Read the history of Catalonia and the Levante →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the year 138 BC, the Roman consul Decimus Junius Brutus founded a small colony on the banks of the Turia river and called it Valentia Edetanorum. The name says it all: 'Valentia' means 'valour' or 'strength' in Latin, and it referred to the military merit of its first settlers. Because Valencia was not born as just any city, but as a reward: it was settled by discharged soldiers who had fought in the wars against Viriathus, the Lusitanian chieftain who for years harried Rome's legions in Hispania. Those veterans were given land and a place to grow old, on an easily defended river island, beside a navigable river and near the sea.
Roman Valentia grew slowly but solidly. It was laid out on classical lines, with its forum, its cardo and its decumanus (the main streets whose line can still be traced in the old town), temples, baths and a circus. The remains of that city can be seen today at the Almoina site, next to the cathedral, where layer upon layer of history (Roman, Visigothic, Muslim and Christian) is stacked like a book of stone. During the Roman civil wars the city suffered almost total destruction around 75 BC, in the clash between Pompey and Sertorius's supporters, but it was rebuilt and in the second century AD lived its greatest imperial splendour.
With the crisis of the Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, Valentia passed into Visigothic hands, who kept it as an episcopal see. Few traces survive of those dark centuries, but the city never quite disappeared: it was still a small Christian settlement when, at the start of the eighth century, the history of the peninsula was completely overturned by the arrival of Islam.
In the year 714, barely three years after the Muslim landing on the peninsula, Valencia surrendered to the Arab and Berber armies with almost no resistance. So began a period of more than five centuries that would mark the landscape, the agriculture and the character of the city for ever. Under the name Balansiya, old Valentia was transformed into a prosperous Andalusi city, especially from the tenth century and during the taifa kingdoms, when it became the capital of an independent kingdom.
The great legacy of those centuries was water. The Muslims perfected an irrigation system based on channels that spread the Turia's water across the whole plain, turning it into the fertile huerta that still surrounds the city. From that hydraulic ingenuity also came the Water Tribunal, the oldest judicial institution in Europe still in operation, which meets every Thursday beside the cathedral door to settle irrigation disputes. Also from this period are the layout of quarters such as El Carme and La Xerea, the first walled enclosure and the introduction of crops that are now symbols of the region: rice, oranges, lemons, saffron.
In 1094, as the taifas were crumbling, the city was conquered by one of the most legendary figures in Spanish history: Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador. A mercenary and a brilliant strategist, El Cid took Valencia after a long siege and governed it as an almost independent lord until his death in 1099. His widow, Jimena, held out a few years longer, but in 1102 the Christians abandoned the city and burned it before withdrawing, and Balansiya returned to Muslim hands, now under the Almoravids and then the Almohads. The definitive reconquest would have to wait more than another century.
On 9 October 1238, King James I of Aragón, nicknamed 'the Conqueror', entered Valencia in triumph after a long siege, taking it definitively from Muslim rule. That date is today the Day of the Valencian Community, the founding anniversary of modern Valencia, and it is celebrated each year with the historic civic procession of the Senyera, the Valencian flag.
The conquest was not a simple change of hands: with the territories he had won, James I created a new, separate kingdom, the Kingdom of Valencia, part of the Crown of Aragón but with its own institutions, laws and character. In 1261 he promulgated the Furs de València (the Charters of Valencia), a legal code advanced for its time that governed the life of the kingdom and gave the city broad liberties and self-government. A new society and a new language also emerged, Valencian, a Romance tongue derived from Latin and related to Catalan, which consolidated as the kingdom's own language.
The Muslims who stayed (the Mudéjars, later Moriscos) remained an essential part of the population and the economy, above all in the countryside, for centuries, until their tragic expulsion in 1609. On the site of the old main mosque, from 1262, the present Gothic cathedral began to rise, and the Christian city started to grow with new churches, convents and walls. Valencia now turned towards the Mediterranean and towards trade, laying the foundations of the splendour that would burst out two centuries later.
The fifteenth century was Valencia's great century, its Golden Age. As the main port and financial centre of the Crown of Aragón, the city experienced an explosion of wealth, population and culture that placed it among the most important and populous cities of the western Mediterranean. The engine of that prosperity was trade, and very particularly the silk trade, an industry that would employ whole districts of weavers for generations.
The stone symbol of that splendour is the Lonja de la Seda (La Llotja de la Seda), built between 1483 and 1548 and today a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its Contract Hall, with its twisted columns opening like palm trees towards the vaults, is one of the peaks of European civil Gothic and a monument to the city's commercial power. On its walls, a Latin inscription urges merchants to act honestly and without usury, a reminder that the prestige of all Valencia was at stake there.
It was also a cultural golden age. Around 1478 the first Bible printed in a Romance language (a translation into Valencian) was printed in Valencia, and from this period and this land come leading literary figures such as the poet Ausiàs March, the knight and novelist Joanot Martorell — author of Tirant lo Blanc, a masterpiece Cervantes praised in Don Quixote — and the writer Isabel de Villena. The city filled with palaces, churches and works of art.
The decline came afterwards. The union of the crowns of Castile and Aragón, the shift of trade towards the Atlantic after the discovery of the Americas, the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 (which emptied the huerta) and the War of the Spanish Succession, with defeat at the battle of Almansa in 1707 and the abolition of the Furs by Philip V's Nueva Planta decrees, gradually eroded Valencia's weight and liberties. The city entered a long period of reduced prominence from which it would emerge only with modernity.
The nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth gave Valencia back some of its drive: the export of oranges and wine, industry, the demolition of the medieval walls in 1865 to let the city grow, and an intense cultural life that produced painters such as Joaquín Sorolla, master of Mediterranean light, and writers such as Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. The city was modernising, though not without the upheavals of the age, including the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), during which Valencia was the capital of the Republic for almost a year.
But the event that most transformed contemporary Valencia was a catastrophe. On the night of 14 October 1957, after torrential rain, the Turia burst its banks and a gigantic flood inundated the city. The water reached several metres in the streets of the centre, destroyed homes, businesses and infrastructure and left dozens dead (official figures speak of around 80 victims, though there were probably more). It was one of the greatest tragedies in the city's modern history.
The response was radical and visionary. To stop it happening again, the so-called Plan Sur was carried out, diverting the Turia entirely along a new artificial channel south of the city, taking the river away from the urban centre. That left the question of what to do with the old dry bed running through Valencia. For years there were plans to turn it into a major motorway, but a strong public campaign under the slogan 'El llit del Túria és nostre i el volem verd' ('The Turia bed is ours and we want it green') stopped the plan. So the Turia Gardens were born, a nine-kilometre park that is today the city's lung and its pride.
It was precisely on the final stretch of that old bed that, from the late 1990s, the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava raised the City of Arts and Sciences, the futuristic complex that became Valencia's new image around the world. With its Oceanogràfic, its museums, its beaches, its restored old town and its Fallas listed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016, the city that was born as a reward for a group of Roman soldiers is today one of the brightest and most enjoyable destinations in Spain. In October 2024, the memory of 1957 returned with the tragic DANA storm that struck the metropolitan district and was, once again, a reminder of this land's delicate relationship with water.