Imagine a sunny Spanish city within a couple of hours flight from London, with a beach, a healthy portion of child-friendly culture, including a major football team, and little chance of walking for more than ten minutes without an opportunity to sit outside a cafe enjoying top quality beer, tapas, food or ice-cream as you desire. You may think of Barcelona here, but let’s take away the tourist throngs and flatten the hills so that children and idle parents can cycle around it, and welcome to Valencia.
For a family trip, the vast sandy beach at Valencia is a huge advantage. It’s similar in scale to the little visited beaches down the East Coast of England, but with brighter sunshine and softer sand. Even with the advancing ages of our children (10 and 14 by now, the eldest having been outsourced on a school trip), it’s easy to while away an entire day at the seaside. There was rather a strong wind while we were there, which made frisbee throwing amusingly unpredictable. The sea was pretty cold as it was early in the year, but the air was warm despite the breeze, and the sun was always always in the sky. A row of restaurants line the promenade along the edge of the beach, varying in quality but improving massively a few streets back into the old fishermans’ quarter. Around the corner from the beach lies the slightly faded glamour of the marina that hosted the America’s Cup a few years ago, with the super yachts still worth a wander to see.
In a blur it’s the final full day of our extended weekend break, so time to explore the historic city centre. We again rented bikes to potter along, not just along the river bed, but across a network of fully segregated and connected cycle tracks around the city. This gave us a better idea of the general layout, so we the wandered through squares and alleyways of the pedestrianised city centre, dropping into the renowned market for the smells and snacks essential to sustaining a family, quick tick-off of historic sights and a surprising interest from #2 son in a castle that housed the exiled national government during the Spanish Civil war that he had been studying at school and I had vaguely absorbed via Hemingway. Our target, as recommended by a Valencia-based family blogger (https://www.anepiceducation.com/top-23-things-valencia-spain-kids/), was the ancient city gate of Torres de Quart. Well away from the tour groups in the central squares around the cathedral, this heavily fortified gate once guarded the main entrance to the city. It was one of those monuments with a crazily cheap entrance fee, and it’s castle-like construction with thick walls and winding staircases made it a fun excursion for all of us. We seemed to climb up, and up, and up; each level offering progressively more distant views of the squares below, the wider city, and eventually the surrounding hills to one side and sea to the other.
The truly unique and glorious aspect of Valencia with kidsis its river; or more correctly; the space where it’s river used to be. Like most medieval European coastal cities, Valencia’s historic centre is a couple of miles inland, having developed around a port upstream from the sea. However unlike most medieval European coastal cities, the river was drained after a serious flood in the 1950’s, and the river bed turned into a huge park stretching right across town.We hired a four-seater bicycle and pottered up and down the park to see the sights. Through several miles, the wide tract of traffic-free land is the home of a range of outstanding modernist architecture housing concert halls and museums; there are Football pitches, childrens’ playgrounds in a range of styles, shady meadows, cycle tracks and footpaths, lakes and fountains. A particularly inspired playground is themed around Gulliver in Lilliput, made up of an enormous concrete statue of Gulliver tied to the ground, with his coat tails forming a series of slides for the Lilliputian children.
The vista across the flat roofs sprinkled with TV ariels was surprisingly ugly after the prettiness of the city at ground level. The occasional medieval tower poked randomly through the blocks of flats, reminding us that this is primarily a city for people to live in rather than visit. And who wouldn’t want to live in this sunny paradise between mountain and sea? And I think that’s what gives it the edge over Barcelona, less of a tourist attraction, and more of a living breathing city for its own people.
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