Valencia is in the throes of an extraordinary renaissance, with dazzling new buildings and museums, a resurgent old town humming with activity, and a fizzing nightlife virtually unrivalled in Europe.
Combine this with a microclimate that generally stays warm and sunny right through the winter, and you have a captivating weekend or short-stay destination.
Why else would three budget airlines have launched direct flights from the UK to compete with the existing daily BA services?
I made first for the huge, futuristic City of Arts and Sciences complex, an astounding collection of white concrete and glass structures strewn along the ribbon-shaped, dried-up bed of the Turia. The complex encompasses the eye-shaped IMAX cinema/laserium/planetarium; Oceanografic, Europe’s largest aquarium and marine park, with a roof like petals of a giant water lily; and Umbracle, a covered palm tree walk which brings to mind the Eden Project. A jaw-dropping giant silver egg, under construction as the Palacio de las Artes opera house and due to open in October, may yet become as iconic as its counterpart in Sydney.
All of these are the work of the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, who is rapidly becoming to Valencia what Antoni Gaudí is to Barcelona. Calatrava is certainly not to everybody’s taste, but love or loathe his freakish Post-Modernism, it is hardly the face of a backward-looking city.
I found the City of Arts and Sciences packed with families and school parties — a riot of babble and laughter. And although I was mesmerised more by the buildings themselves than the hands-on exhibits or Perspex tunnel through a tank of tiger sharks, it was a joy to see the new complex taken to heart by Valencia’s young.
Valencia has been chosen as the venue for the 2007 America’s Cup sailing extravaganza, which will attract a vast global television audience and millions of visitors to pre-regattas in advance of the main event. The selection only fuelled a revitalisation in Valencia that has been going on for ten years, says Ana Farinos, of the city’s tourism promotion department.
I crossed the Turia via the Alameda bridge (another daring Calatrava creation) towards to the harbourfront, where America’s Cup yachts of the South African and New Zealand teams were sailing in after a qualifying race.
The waterside area is undergoing a surge of regeneration and reconstruction. However, surprisingly for a seaboard city with year-round sun, little of the city’s social or cultural life is at present played out by the water.
The Balneario de las Arenas Hotel, a huge five-star under construction and due to open in late summer, will be Valencia’s first on Paseo Maritimo, the main seafront promenade along the Malvarrosa beach.
The city’s heart beats in the Casco Antiguo — the beautiful, compact old town packed with historic sites, little squares and markets around it. It is here that dilapidated palaces and townhouses of 19th-century noblemen and merchants have been revamped as boutique hotels, their minimalist decor and plasma screens serving notice that Valencia has arrived in the 21st century.
If Calatrava’s fantastical shapes have to be seen to be believed, so too does the extravagant Gothic-Renaissance Lonja de la Seda, the silk exchange. This is Valencia’s Unesco World Heritage Site in the old town — a 15th-century indoor marketplace with a cathedral-like rib-vaulted ceiling, comical gargoyles sticking out their tongues, and alabaster columns twisting and turning.
