Food & drink
Valencia, paella and the City of Arts and Sciences
Paella was born in the rice fields outside Valencia, and the Valencians have firm views on how it should be made. The city itself turned its old riverbed into a garden and filled one end with gleaming white buildings.
By Walter Pellow2 November 20264 min read
Ask for paella in Valencia and you may be asked a question in return: which one? To most of the world, paella is a yellow rice dish heaped with prawns and mussels. To a Valencian, the original paella, paella valenciana, is a dish of the countryside, not the coast, and contains no seafood at all. It is made with rice, chicken and rabbit, flat green beans and the large white beans called garrofó, olive oil, tomato, saffron and water, sometimes with snails and a sprig of rosemary, cooked in a wide, shallow, two-handled pan over a wood fire. The pan itself is the paella; the dish took its name.
Seafood paellas exist, of course, and the city's beach restaurants make them well. But it is worth trying the old one at least once, and there are firm rules for it, which Valencians debate with the passion other people reserve for football.
The rice of the Albufera
The rice comes from just outside the city. South of Valencia, behind a strip of dunes and pine woods along the coast, lies the Albufera, a large freshwater lagoon fringed with reeds and surrounded by flat, flooded rice fields that shine like mirrors in early summer and turn gold before the harvest. Rice has been grown here since the centuries of Moorish rule, and the lagoon is now a natural park, full of herons, egrets and ducks.
The village of El Palmar, on an island among the canals, is where Valencians go to eat paella at the source, at long tables in restaurants beside the water, and a boat trip on the lagoon at sunset, in a flat-bottomed wooden boat, is part of the ritual.
Two rules apply. Paella is a lunchtime dish, not a supper, and it takes time: a proper one is cooked to order, and the wait is part of the meal. The prize is the socarrat, the thin layer of rice caught and toasted on the bottom of the pan, which is scraped off and fought over at the end.
To a Valencian, the original paella is a dish of the countryside, not the coast, and contains no seafood at all.
The riverbed and the white city
Valencia's other great work is in the city itself, and it began with a disaster. In 1957 the River Turia, which ran through the middle of Valencia, burst its banks and flooded the city, and afterwards the river was diverted around the south of the city in a new channel. The old riverbed, left dry and running in a long curve through the centre, was eventually turned not into a motorway, as was once proposed, but into a park: the Jardí del Túria, a green ribbon of gardens, paths, playing fields and orange trees, crossed by the old stone bridges, and a joy to walk or cycle.
At its south-eastern end stands the City of Arts and Sciences, a complex of futuristic white buildings, most of them designed by Santiago Calatrava, a native of Valencia, and opened in stages from 1998. There is a planetarium in the shape of an eye, a science museum like the skeleton of some great white creature, an opera house with a huge curving crest, and an aquarium, the Oceanogràfic, whose roofs were designed by Félix Candela. Set among shallow pools of turquoise water, they look extraordinary, especially at dusk when the lights come on.
The old city has its own treasures: the cathedral, which keeps a chalice venerated as the Holy Grail; the Gothic silk exchange, La Lonja, a World Heritage Site; and the Mercado Central, a great iron-and-glass market hall where you can buy the ingredients for a paella, if you dare.
Cruises that call there
Valencia's port is a regular stop on Mediterranean cruises.
Ambassador Cruise Line's seventeen-night Golden Days Along the Mediterranean sails from Bristol Royal Portbury in November, with Cadiz, Malaga, Almeria, Alicante, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, Port Mahon, Ceuta, Gibraltar and Lisbon among its ports.
Fred. Olsen's seventeen-night Mediterranean Islands & Spanish Shores sails from Piraeus, for Athens, in December, calling at Valletta, Trapani, Cagliari, Mahon, Malaga, Ceuta, Motril, Cartagena, Valencia and Cadiz.
Ambassador's nineteen-night Mediterranean Moments & Solar Eclipse sails from Dundee in July, with Leixoes, Gibraltar, Almeria, Alicante, Valencia, Ibiza, Ceuta, Cadiz, Vigo and Santiago de Compostela on its itinerary.
With a day ashore, walk the old riverbed to the City of Arts and Sciences in the morning, and find a paella for lunch. Order it, wait for it, and save the socarrat for last.
By Walter Pellow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.
