Valencia: The most chilled hot city in Spain

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. 

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. 

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 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. 

Barcelona: Ultimate Family City Break

Barcelona must be one of the best cities in the world to just wander. Just wandering is not always pleasant with children getting bored and tired, but central Barcelona is a living, indeed thriving, residential city, with ample parks and squares with playgrounds and drinks appearing every couple of blocks. We went over New Year, when it was pleasantly warm but far from oppressively hot. The streets are in a grid structure, making it hard to get lost. The boulevards are wide, with broad walkways well away from the traffic. This was a bit like one of those pre-children city-breaks when we just used to wander from café to café in a strange place, only we had children this time, and managed to find a pace of exploration that was to everyone’s liking.

And whilst food for travelling children can be a bit tiresome, Spain has Tapas. Within an hour or two of landing, we had dumped our bags in the flat that would be our home for the next few days, and nipped round the corner to the nearest sunny square for January outdoor dining. The great thing about sharing Tapas is that amongst the dozen or so little plates between the 5 of us, each child will try most of them, and generally end up fed. Simple basics like patatas bravas are really a take on chips and ketchup (well – that’s what we told them), croquetas de pollo are rather nicer than the chicken nuggets in British fast-food outlets. With the added optional reward of churros y chocolate, we all ate well.

Our flat was close to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s monumental cathedral which seems to be a perpetual building site. However, children and adults alike will gawp dumbstruck at the building as it stands now – the images and stonework are like no other church we have seen. The scale is breathtaking now, its hard to imagine that the even larger central spire representing Christ is still to be built. Every city has a gothic cathedral of some kind; indeed Barcelona has a rather fun one with palm trees in the cloisters, but the Sagrada Familia is absolutely something else. And although that’s probably the highlight, it sets a high bar for standards of architecture across the city. A little planning on the wandering took us past plenty of buildings that were just that little bit more crazy than necessary. The famous Casa Mila and Casa Batllo are well know, but wander past Casa Calvet and Bellesguard for some unexpected interested buildings dropped into otherwise quite normal areas. And although there is now an entrance fee for the more famous parts Parc Guell, there is still plenty to see and wander through in the free bits.

The excitement of the city makes it easy to forget that Barcelona is actually a port and also has a beach. My various beachy blogs demonstrate that children and sand are a fantastic combination, they can be amused for hours. Barcelona beach has the added panache of CableCar from the beach up to the Olympic Park up the mountain on Montjuic. Whilst the Olympic park is a pleasant diversion, the views from the CableCar really should not be missed. During our visit, we also saw the Three Kings arrive by sea to celebrate Christmas, generally observed by Catalans over Epiphany.  The children (in reality just our younger one) went onto the boat to see the Kings, and get some sweets and cakes, a fantastic tradition to witness.

If that was her highlight, the highlight for the boys was a trip to Camp Nou to watch Barcelona play Elche. Unlike Premier League games in the UK, the stadium is vast enough to service season-tickets and visitors alike, enabling us to watch the finest football club in the world, admittedly playing one La Liga’s lesser known clubs, for only EUR 19 each! The architecture of the stadium means that even the cheap seats like ours are closer to the action than most large stadia, with the big name players clearly recognisable below us. An injured but recovering Messi tantalising warming up but sadly not playing, however Fabregas, Iniesta, Sanchez were all working hard to show us why they are worlds best. We had given the tickets to the boys as a surprise Christmas present a week earlier, but I don’t think they really believed it was happening until kick-off. 

City breaks with children have the potential to be quite tiresome - the things that adults look for are often different to what children enjoy, However, I think Barcelona has the right combination of sights and experiences for everyone enjoy together. The relaxed atmosphere, plenty of space to run around, and easy food choices add to the combination that any family can enjoy their time there.