Where to Stay in Valencia, Comunitat Valenciana

What is Valencia known for?

Valencia is known for the Falles, for paella, and for the white shells of the City of Arts and Sciences. Fire ends the festival. Each March the neighbourhoods raise satirical monuments in the streets and burn them on the last night, a craft the Museu Faller de València keeps on display through the rest of the year.

Rice grew here first. The paddies of the Albufera south of the city gave the dish its name and its short grain, and L'Oceanogràfic and L'Umbracle draw the crowds the old centre once held alone.

What are the main landmarks in Valencia?

Valencia's oldest landmark lies underfoot. The Centre Arqueològic de l'Almoina shows the Roman forum through a glass floor, and the Roman thermae of Valencia survive a short way off, beneath the same dense grid of streets that carries the Church of San Nicolás and the Church of Sant Joan del Mercat. Calatrava changed the skyline.

His City of Arts and Sciences fills the drained Turia bed with the Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe, L'Umbracle and L'Oceanogràfic, while the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern keeps the modern painting a few blocks north.

What is the history of Valencia?

Roman colonists founded Valencia in 138 BC. Veterans of the legions took a river island in the Turia and called the place Valentia Edetanorum, a name the excavated forum under the Centre Arqueològic de l'Almoina still carries. Rome fell away.

Visigoths, then the armies of Islam, held the town from the eighth century, and under the name Balansiya it grew rich on irrigated huerta land whose channels still divide the fields west of the city. James I of Aragon took the city in 1238 and made it the capital of a new kingdom. Silk did the rest.

Weavers and merchants filled the fifteenth century with trade, and the churches of Santa Catalina and Sant Joan del Mercat were rebuilt on the profits. The old kingdom kept its own law and its own tongue until the Bourbon decrees of 1707 swept both away. Modern Valencia begins with water.

After the Turia broke its banks in 1957 and drowned the streets, engineers cut a new channel south of the city and left the old bed dry, and the gardens laid into it run from the inland edge to the sea.

Where is Valencia?

Valencia stands on the coastal plain of eastern Spain, where the Turia reaches the Mediterranean. Flat ground reaches inland from the shore until the Serra Calderona lifts it to the north-west, and the huerta between them is cut into small irrigated plots by channels older than the kingdom. South of the port the Albufera lagoon lies behind a bar of pine and sand, shallow and thick with rice paddies.

The city barely rises.

What is the climate of Valencia?

Valencia keeps a mild Mediterranean climate that the sea, not the land, decides. Winters stay soft and bright, with frost almost unknown on the coastal plain, while July and August turn heavy and humid until the sea breeze reaches the streets in the afternoon. Autumn is the violent season.

Cold air moving over warm Mediterranean water drops the rain the huerta needs and, in bad years, more water in a day than the Turia channel can take.

How do you get to Valencia?

Valencia connects to Madrid by the high-speed line into Joaquín Sorolla station, a run of well under two hours. The older Estació del Nord sits beside it and handles the regional trains along the coast, while Metrovalencia carries the airport line in from Manises on the western edge. Ferries leave the port for the Balearics.

Drivers arrive on the AP-7, which follows the coast from Catalonia to Alacant and skirts the huerta north of the city.