This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Some call it Valencia’s green lung, others its heart — but all locals agree that the Turia Gardens is one of the city’s essential organs. People come to this meandering 7.5-mile ribbon of riverbed-turned-parkland to do the things that make life worth living. On the day of my visit, it’s sunny (it usually is) and pleasure is unfolding in all its manifold forms. As well as cyclists like me, people on inline skates propel themselves along its paths. On the grass are sunbathers and picnickers, plus a group practising tightrope walking; in the shade of a jacaranda, a woman plays her violin.
For Valencians, this is much more than a park — it’s a symbol of hope, of triumph over disaster. Here on the Mediterranean coast, the rain in Spain falls mainly during the gota fría, or ‘cold drop’, and it was one of these monsoon-like autumnal downpours that in 1957 caused the Turia River to flood, killing 81 people. It was subsequently diverted around the city. The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco planned to build a highway in its place but, in an early example of environmental activism, locals fought to claim the space, using the slogan: ‘The river is ours and we want it green’.
Their victory was significant. Today, 97% of Valencians live 1,000ft or less from a green space — it’s one of the key reasons the European Commission chose the city as its Green Capital for 2024. My bike ride through the Turia Garden takes in part of a huge cycle network — covering more than 120 miles — and one of four ‘Green Routes’ showcasing the city’s efforts towards sustainability. It’s my first taste of Valencia’s eco-tourism offering on a five-day exploration that will take me out into the wider region and into its diverse natural environments.
Charting my progress on Google Maps — phone balanced in the basket of my rented bike — I wend my way towards Valencia’s historic core. Pedalling along mostly pedestrianised streets, I pass an endless slew of beautiful buildings — the Palace of the Marqués de Dos Aguas (now a ceramics museum), with its ornate baroque exterior, and honey-hued, hegemonic Valencia Cathedral — but most impressive of all is the modernist Central Market. The city’s cathedral to food, it’s perhaps no coincidence that its design was inspired by Venice’s Saint Mark’s Basilica. “This is still a real locals’ market,” says city guide Carlos Andrés García Llabata. We pause on its threshold to admire its soaring stained-glass windows. “Most of the produce here is local, too — fish from the coast and vegetables and fruit from Valencia’s fields and orchards.”
I head inside and, gazing up, notice ceramic tiles painted with the region’s celebrated oranges. Sunshine pours in through windows in the domed ceiling, making the produce — rosy tomatoes and regal aubergines among them — gleam. Municipal markets like this one are integral to the area’s sustainable food chains, allowing small farmers from La Huerta de Valencia (Valencia’s fertile lands) to sell directly to consumers, keeping prices affordable by cutting out the middleman. Strolling among its 1,200-odd stalls, I’m gratified to spot the ingredients used to make some of the region’s most famous culinary inventions: tiger nuts to make the sweet, creamy drink horchata, as well as all the necessaries (pan included) for paella Valenciana.
The latter, the region’s signature dish — now so famous it even has its own emoji — is indicative of Valencia’s longstanding expertise in culinary thrift.
It’s said to have been invented by the rice farmers, who’d gather in the fields to share a one-pot lunch featuring whatever ingredients they had to hand. Over the centuries, paella has evolved into a far less utilitarian meal — preparing the dish for family and friends often an almost sacred ritual.
A sea of rice
The region’s best arroz (rice) comes from an area 11 miles south of the city. To qualify for the prestigious ‘DOP’ label, varieties like bomba, senia and bahía must be grown inside the boundaries of Albufera Natural Park, a nature reserve covering 82sq miles. This ‘protected designation of origin’ status confirms that certain foods and drinks come from a specific place and are produced in a certain way, much like the system that distinguishes Champagne from other French sparkling wines. Like rice cultivation itself, the word ‘albufera’ has its roots in Spain’s Moorish past. Al-buhayra, Arabic for ‘little sea’, was what the Muslim empire that ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492 called its huge freshwater lagoon, separated from the Mediterranean by a slender strip of pine-forested dunes.
For nine months of the year, the rice paddies surrounding the lagoon are submerged, creating a landscape so watery it can feel almost dreamlike. This is especially true at sunset, when lateen sail boats and traditional wooden vessels called albuferenc set out from the jetty at Gola de Pujol, offering tours of the Albufera lagoon. There’s even one that offers an on-deck paella service. Unsurprisingly, fishing was once a major industry here, and many fishermen would’ve lived in one of the region’s distinctive barracas: squat, A-frame buildings with thatched roofs. Now they’re mostly used as summer houses — places to host guests for languorous lunches — or occasionally as a restaurant setting.
“Paella isn’t a culture, it’s a religion,” says Santos Ruíz, who works with Arroz de Valencia PDO to protect and promote its product. We’re talking at his company’s barraca in El Palmar, an island hamlet in the heart of the natural park, where I join several other guests for lunch. Wearing an apron and a heated expression — he’s a man who’s truly evangelical about rice — Santos flings wood onto the fire of his outdoor paella kitchen. “The true paella Valenciana, made with rabbit, chicken and vegetable, we only really make on Sundays,” he says. As it’s traditional for guests to take part in the cooking process, Santos hands me a glass of Cava and a basket of beans to shell.
Like all major religions, paella has many rules, which Santos outlines as we sit in the shade of a vine-wrapped pergola to enjoy the fruits of his labours. “Firstly, everyone knows how difficult paella is to make, so you can complain as much as you like during the cooking — what, you’re not adding garlic?! — but when the dish is set on the table there must be applause for the chef. Then, everyone eats from the pan — and with a spoon, not a fork.” Only children are served their portion on plates, he explains, and their first meal from the pan — usually in adolescence — is considered something of a rite of passage.
“Only take from your section,” says Santos, indicating the boundaries of my area with his hands. “Any meat you don’t want goes into the middle, where someone else can take it.” Like everyone around the table, I eat more than I intended to, each mouthful encouraging another. The rice is rich and nutty and, because of its high absorbency, packed with the flavours of the land.
That land — the rice fields that make up 70% of the surface of Albufera Natural Park — is also a key habitat for migrating birds, which prefer the paddies to the lagoon. “Ours is an entirely man-made landscape — we have a ‘natural park’ that isn’t really very natural at all,” says my guide Yanina Maggiotto, when we meet at the wetlands’ visitor centre the next day. Her company, Visit Natura, runs wildlife, photography and birdwatching excursions, and I’m struck by how bird-like Yanina herself is — petite, curious and in almost perpetual motion. “I’m from Argentina,” she continues, “but, as soon as I arrived here, I knew I was home.”
I follow her along a pathway fringed with palm trees and pines, the sand underfoot studded with fallen needles and fragments of shell. Bindweed hangs from higher branches like tangled sheets on a washing line, creating a canopy of foliage so thick we’re temporarily thrown into shade. Yanina tells me this is part of an ecosystem known as the ‘macchia mediterranea’: mostly dense evergreen shrubland and small trees.
We emerge onto a small, salt-rimmed lagoon with a wooden bird hide set on its shoreline. Here we fall silent, watching what appears to be some sort of bird party: hundreds of feathered friends, gathered to chatter, eat and drink. Yanina points out black-winged stilts and sandwich terns, but it’s the flamingos that snag my attention. “They don’t turn pink until they’re about four years old,” she whispers. “They get their colour from eating invertebrates that contain high doses of the pigment carotene.” The etymology of the word ‘flamingo’ is in fact, Spanish — it originates from flamengo, meaning ‘flame-coloured’.
The landscape itself is rich in colour in Carcaixent, 50 minutes south of the park. I drive through the region at dawn, winding my way through an apparently endless series of groves, the trees’ white blossoms scenting the air with a subtle perfume. Every now and then a gateway offers a glimpse of a grand house, a palm-tree lined path spotted with orange orbs, luminous in the shadows. This is the cradle of Valencia’s famous orange; the region where, in 1781, the first plantations were established, growing a variety believed to have originated somewhere in Asia.
The Ribera family have been here nearly as long — their orchard, Huerto Ribera, was built in 1870. The house at its centre is an eclectic architectural mix, with a Norman-style carved roof, mosque-like ceramic tiling and a modernist facade. “Every year in Carcaixent we have the Feria Modernista, a festival that recreates the lifestyle during the golden age of oranges,” says my guide Ana Soler, the sun bringing out the warmth of her eyes as we stand on a patio overlooking the orchards. The Ribera family also commissioned one of Carcaixent town’s most striking modernist buildings, Magatzem de Ribera, a former orange store that’s now a civic building at the heart of the annual festivities, hosting a turn-of-the-century fashion show. “The particularities of this landscape have changed very little since the beginning of the 20th century,” says Ana. “It’s still a sea of orange trees, without many walls or fences.”
On a tour of the orchards, I’m introduced to citrus varieties that look and sound like they were invented by Willy Wonka — the brown-skinned ‘chocolate orange’; a ‘buddha’s hand’, with gnarled yellow segments that look like digits; and finger limes, also known as ‘citrus caviar’ because they can fetch more than £200 per kilo. Afterwards, on a verandah with views over Huerto Ribera’s carefully tended gardens, I’m served the freshest of freshly squeezed orange juice as part of a traditional Valencian esmorzaret. The local dialect for ‘little breakfast’, this meal can take place any time between 9am and 12pm and usually includes blanco y negro (a sandwich stuffed with both white and black sausages) and cremaet (rum-laced coffee flavoured with cinnamon and citrus peel). It’s hearty, hikers’ fare — and I find myself longing for an opportunity to walk it off.
Mini mountains
The perfect place to do just that is in the Sierra Calderona Natural Park, Valencia’s closest mountains, about an hour’s drive north of the city. They aren’t whoppers — most are under 3,000ft — but what the landscape lacks in height, it more than makes up for in personality, with jagged stone peaks and forested ravines.
“I think of this landscape as more like a video than a picture,” says Guillermo Tenorio García, a guide for ecotourism company Itinerantur, whom I meet at the park’s thousand-year-old olive tree, La Morruda. “It’s changing all the time.”
I am joining Guillermo for a whistle-stop tour of some of the park’s highlights. He sees his role as an ‘interpreter’ of the landscape, believing those who understand their environment are more motivated to protect it.
We hop in the car and are driving along a road that winds upwards through endless pine forest when the windscreen suddenly frames a vast lake, sparkling in the sunshine. Guillermo tells me that locals call it, inexplicably, Laguna de la Rosa (‘pink lake’). Today it is decidedly emerald green. “This is an old stone mining site,” he tells me. “When they’re done with a quarry, it’s usually lined with clay to allow it to hold water. It’s a remediation of the land.” Alert to some signal I’m clearly oblivious to, Guillermo looks up abruptly, pointing at the sky — I get a glimpse of brilliant plumage as a flock of birds do a fly-past. “Bee-eaters,” he says. Like me, they’re not from round here — having, in fact, come all the way from Africa.
We drive on to Masía de Tristán, a forested recreational area in the mountains with a smattering of picnic tables, parking up beside a spooky abandoned house with a tall chimney. Guillermo tells me it dates from the early 17th-century and was once home to a community of self-sufficient farmers. From here, we follow a route towards Pico Tristán on one of the park’s many waymarked walking trails. The path ascends to 2,490ft, offering views over the most protected area of the Sierra Calderona and its cork forests.
It’s known for being especially peaceful, and the complete absence of other human beings helps me focus more deeply on my surroundings. Our discoveries include a bushel of madroño berries so sweet they sometimes ferment into alcohol in the sun, and swathes of wild fennel and thyme. We rub the leaves between our fingers, releasing their rich, aromatic scent.
Perched at the top of some of the taller trees are great clouds of witch’s broom, a tree deformity that has the look of a sinister bird’s nest. This part of the forest, says Guillermo, is mostly cork — a slow-growing tree that Spain desperately needs more of. “Our climate is changing and becoming more prone to fire, but cork trees are fire-proof,” he explains.
“To have healthy forests in the future we need to cultivate and protect these trees now — and reduce the quantities of pine we have everywhere else.”
We don’t complete the full seven miles of the trail — the heat is soon so intense we’re obliged to retreat to a local restaurant for lunch, rather proving Guillermo’s point.
It’s close to sunset by the time we reach El Garbí, a 12-mile drive east and one of the highest viewpoints in Sierra Calderona. Here, a cascade of rocky promontories have created a natural amphitheatre, and people clutch beers and snacks as they make their way to their seats to watch nature’s nightly light show. I take my place up in the gods and stare out at the view: hills and valleys studded with white villages — an undulating landscape that stretches all the way to the sea. There on the horizon is the city where my journey began: Valencia, shimmering like a jewel in the heat haze and surrounded on all sides by green.
Published in the September 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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