Valencia Spain: A City of Joy!

The writer Dominique Lapierre once called Calcutta - now Kolkata - the “City of Joy.” I’ve never been there, so I can’t speak to whether the name fits, but if I were going to borrow that description for any city Carla and I have visited, Valencia would certainly be high on the list.

There’s something wonderfully buoyant about the place. The people seem to take genuine pleasure in their city, their food, their traditions, and the simple business of being together. That feeling isn’t confined to festivals or special occasions. You sense it in the parks, cafés, markets, plazas, and streets. Valencia feels lived in rather than merely visited, and from our first days there, we found it remarkably easy to settle into its rhythm.

Valencia is Spain’s third-largest city, but it doesn’t really feel like one. Compared with Madrid or Barcelona, it has a more manageable scale, and much of the historic center feels surprisingly intimate. You can walk from one neighborhood into another without feeling swallowed by the city, and although there is plenty of energy and movement, Valencia rarely seemed frantic to us. It has the advantages of a large city without constantly reminding you that you are living in one.

Architecturally, Valencia is a wonderful mixture of eras and influences. Roman, Islamic, Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, and contemporary architecture all share the city, sometimes only a few blocks apart. You can almost follow Valencia’s history simply by walking its streets. The cathedral itself reflects some of those layers, rising on a site that has served different religious traditions over the centuries, while the magnificent Lonja de la Seda - the old Silk Exchange - is a reminder of just how prosperous and important the city once was as a trading center.

And then, almost as if Valencia decided that centuries of historic architecture weren’t enough, it created the City of Arts and Sciences. The futuristic complex could hardly look more different from the old center, yet somehow that contrast feels completely at home here. Designed largely by Santiago Calatrava, its sweeping white forms, reflecting pools, bridges, performance spaces, aquarium, and science museum look as though someone dropped a small piece of the future into the middle of Spain. I’m usually most drawn to old stone, weathered walls, and buildings that reveal their age, but even I found it difficult not to be impressed.

One of the things I appreciate most about Valencia, though, has less to do with buildings than with what the city chose not to build.

After devastating floods in the 1950s, the Turia River was diverted away from the center. That left an enormous old riverbed stretching through the city, and rather than turning it into highways and more development, Valencia eventually transformed much of it into the Turia Gardens, a long green ribbon of parks, paths, trees, playgrounds, gardens, sports fields, and public spaces.

It’s brilliant. You can walk or cycle for miles through the city while surrounded by greenery, passing families, runners, children, people walking dogs, couples sitting beneath trees, and others doing absolutely nothing productive at all. I have great respect for cities that make room for that.

There’s an important difference between a city that has parks and a city that has woven nature into daily life. Valencia has managed the latter.

The city is also wonderfully friendly to bicycles. It’s relatively flat, has an extensive network of bike lanes, and makes cycling feel like a normal means of transportation rather than an extreme sport involving traffic, courage, and a final review of your will. Bikes are everywhere, and because so much of the city is accessible on foot or two wheels, Valencia feels remarkably easy to move through.

Then there’s the food. Valencia is the birthplace of paella, which means eating it here feels less like ordering dinner and more like conducting cultural research. We took our responsibilities seriously.

Ernest Hemingway had a long affection for Spain and wrote about Valencia and the restaurant La Pepica, so naturally we felt compelled to investigate. We walked out toward the beach, sat down near the Mediterranean, and ordered a seafood paella. I can’t tell you whether it was the best paella in the world, and I suspect several thousand Valencians might have opinions on the matter, but I can tell you we thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Central Market was another favorite. European food markets are among my happiest places anywhere, and Valencia’s is exceptional. The building itself is beautiful, but once inside, architecture quickly has competition from fish, cheeses, meats, breads, fruits, vegetables, spices, wine, pastries, olives, and enough other temptations to make any reasonable shopping list completely irrelevant.

I love markets because they tell you something about a place that monuments can’t. This is what people eat. This is what grows nearby. This is what smells good enough to make you stop walking. This is where everyday life happens.

And that may be why Valencia appealed to us so much.

Our first visit had been wonderful, and we left with that slightly dangerous thought travelers occasionally have: We could live here.

When we returned, we were no longer looking at Valencia only as visitors. Carla and I were seriously considering the possibility of making a home somewhere in Europe, so we wanted to see whether the city still felt as good the second time around. It’s easy to fall for a place during a brief visit when every meal is an adventure and nobody has yet asked you to deal with plumbing, paperwork, or Tuesday afternoon.

A second visit can be clarifying. The magic held. We still loved walking the streets. We still loved the parks, food, architecture, markets, and ease of getting around. More importantly, Valencia continued to feel comfortable to us. There was enough happening to keep us curious, but not so much that we felt overwhelmed. It had history without feeling trapped by it, modernity without losing its personality, and a wonderful balance between urban life and outdoor space.

But what stayed with me most was that sense of joy. Perhaps that’s impossible to measure. You won’t find it on a list of attractions, and it probably won’t appear in the statistics used to rank the world’s most livable cities. It’s something you feel in the atmosphere of a place - in the way people use their plazas, the way families gather in parks, the way cafés spill into the streets, and the way a city seems to invite you to participate rather than simply observe.

Some places dazzle you. Some educate you. Some exhaust you, though they may be magnificent while doing it. And then there are places that simply make you feel good to be there. Valencia did that for us on our first visit, and thankfully, it did it again on our second.

Whatever anyone else chooses to call it, I still think of Valencia as our own little City of Joy.