O, Valencia!

Valencia -- home of oranges (above), horchata, paella and the holy grail -- is Spain's third largest city and is located in the Eastern portion of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. A bunch of us went down to check it out at the beginning of December.

We were greeted by a portion of the city's old wall and gates called the Quart Towers on our way to our hostel in the Barrio del Carmen neighborhood.


(Three different Valencian street signs on the same street)

Valencia was part of an ancient kingdom called the Crown of Aragon, a which also included the city of Barcelona, parts of Greece and Sicily. In this kingdom, the language Catalan was spoken, and still is. Valencia has its own dialect of Catalan called Valenciano. As a casual visitor the extent to which it is spoken among locals wasn't apparent, but I definitely saw the influence in the street signs throughout the old Barrio del Carmen district.

On a map, streets names are shown in Spanish, but when you look up for the street sign, the name on the map often does not match the street sign. In fact, some of the words on these signs are spelled so different from those on the map, that saying the Valenciano name aloud is probably the best way to draw a similarity between the two languages. This didn't make for easy navigation around the city.

Valencia getting it's X-Mas on

Here is an Horchateria -- a place where they serve the lovely tiger-nut based beverage horchata. Having tried it in Madrid and not being that impressed (it's a frothy, slushy milky almost soy-tasting concoction), I passed on this visit. But it made a great backdrop for highlighting common sights in Spain: people out with their dogs and an old couples out for their paseos.

There is an impressive range of architecture in Valencia:

Old School: Church tower of Santa Catalina near Plaza de la Reina

More Old School: Plaza de la Virgen and Valencia Cathedral. This is where the holy grail is supposedly housed. We didn't get a chance to see it, or the famous Goya paintings inside ("The Farewell to Saint Francis of Borja", and "The Condemned"), because there was a religious service going on. On this particular weekend, Spain was celebrating a national holiday (Constitution Day, December 6) and a religious holiday (Day of the Immaculate Conception,December 8).


The New Style: So, fast forward 700 years (give or take) and you can see that Valencian architecture has changed dramatically! These are two of the many modern buildings that dot a portion of an old riverbed that runs through the city. These buildings are part of an educational complex called The City of Arts and Sciences (Ciutat de laes Arts i de les Ciencies ). The one on the right is the main building of the aquarium where we visited. It is one of the largest, if not THE largest, aquariums in Europe and houses over 500 species of aquatic life and has an amazing 30-meter long tunnel through some of the larger aquariums.

Last, but not least, we ate some authentic paella Valenciana, which is a rice dish featuring rabbit and chicken and (who knew?) snails. There are many versions of paella and others at our table got a verdant green vegetarian paella and a lobster paella. Info for foodies: all our paellas had that awesome soccarat at the bottom of the pan as all good ones should! Our restaurant was on the beach overlooking the Mediterranean. Well, it was night, honestly, so we really couldn't see the Mediterranean, so a few of us went down to the water to verify, run our hands through the impossibly cold water and then quickly ran back to the restaurant for dessert.