In Valencia, Spain, I am constantly reminded of history’s long arc | Canada Voices

Last spring I travelled to Valencia, the sporty Spanish city on the Mediterranean, to scout a potential story on the Gay Games hosted there this summer. Afterward, I met up with a cousin to track down the place where an English great-uncle had been killed by Franco’s fascists in the 1930s. My grandfather’s dearly beloved younger brother, an idealistic young Oxford graduate named Humfry Gilbert Scott, had joined the international brigade to fight against Franco’s forces.

I am from Toronto, but live in California, and I’d been thinking of my Great-uncle Humfry as contemporary historians drew parallels between what’s been going on in my adopted country and Europe in the 1930s. I also came to Valencia hoping for some respite from the relentless news cycle in the U.S.

In an old city like this, you are constantly reminded of history’s long arc. And so, next to the medieval cathedral, is assembled one day some local worthies in black ceremonial uniforms, comprising a water tribunal dating back a thousand years, to when the Moors ran this city. Citrus fruit was introduced in Moorish times, as well as a system of irrigating the city’s famous citrus orchards – two of the many Moorish innovations to survive the slaughter when the Christians drove the Moors out in 1238.

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At the cathedral, after paying my respects to the supposed Holy Grail housed there, I realized I’d forgotten to bring the cash I knew I needed for the fee to climb the 207 slippery stairs up its tower. A young Valencian in line covers the fee, a small act of generosity that relaxes shoulders which seem to have been clenched for months.

In a nod to one of the gifts of the Moors, I bookended a scorching hot day of this visit with a glass of fresh orange juice in the cool of the covered Central Market in the morning, and an ice-cold one of the orange-accented local cocktail, the Agua de Valencia, in the louche Café de las Horas, at night.

On a bike tour on another scorcher, our guide, local historian Nani Moro, stopped us in front of a mural in the old Barrio del Carmen district, one that has two hands emerging from some cresting waves, lifting a baby above the waters. “That mural is not about this recent flood,” she says, referring to the 2024 flood upstream from the city that killed 205. “This is about the one in the 1950s. Understand, it rains about two times a year here, but when it does, it’s the end of the world, like a bomb went off.”

In 1957, after one such water bomb dropped here, the River Turia burst its banks, killing 81 people. The city decided then to reroute the river, leaving, for some time, a long, thin, fenced-off no man’s land bifurcating Valencia’s urban core. A plan to run a highway through it was mooted, but local activists successfully fought that. Instead, the fertile ex-riverbed has been transformed into a park.

We take a headlong bike ride through the resulting park, careening by athletic fields and young forests and flower gardens, until we come upon an uncanny white city of sculptural buildings, most conceived by the star architect born here, Santiago Calatrava. One of them is shaped, maybe, like a giant warrior’s helmet (and has an art gallery within); another, a museum of science, features a sort of massive dinosaur rib cage; and a third looks, maybe, like a big eyeball emerging from a reflecting pool.

“Barcelona has Gaudi,” Moro says. “Now we have Calatrava.”

Because Valencia was a seat of the resistance to Franco, the last capital of the Republican government, it was consigned to also-ran status during his long dictatorship – as is detailed at the city’s excellent civic history museum set up in a cavernous 19th-century cistern. Post-Franco, Valencia has been coming back as an international destination – now, according to two recent surveys, it’s one of the top destinations for digital nomads in Europe.

In addition to the riverbed park (Valencians still say “I’ll meet you in the river” when going there), the city recently opened the Parc Centrale, a 66-hectare green space conceived by American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, on land reclaimed from factories and railway works. Most evenings, it draws promenading couples and families along meandering paths through trellises covered in pink bougainvillea.

Next to it is a neighbourhood that could not have flowered under ultraconservative, Spain-first Franco. At one corner in vibrant Ruzafa, tables sprawl onto wide sidewalks from a gay bar, the Comic Café; from Trentatres, a restaurant feeding the former working-class neighborhood’s old-timers; and from Punko, a hip Asian-accented tapas bar.

Fresh, innovative takes on traditional food are becoming common here. At his restaurant Habituel, in another covered market, the Colon, chef Ricard Camarena tops his version of the local staple, a potato salad, with green olive foam. An entrée of some smoked Iberian pork has an acidic relish made of eggplants and radishes on top.

But sometimes, culinarily, there’s no point in tweaking. At Bon Aire, a family run restaurant on a strip of land between Albufera, the lake where paella rice has long been grown, and the Mediterranean, the paellas set on the table were the classics: eel in the saffron-flavoured rice sizzling in one pan, chicken and rabbit in another.

After the meal, we took a short boat ride. There were herons hunting in the reeds, ducks quacking away and mullet flashing silver as they leapt out of the water. Our boat’s captain Guillermo Ferrer spoke of how a group of environmental activists (his grandparents among them) fought plans in the 1960s to fill in much of the lake. It now forms part of a national park, sustaining both the animals who live in and on it and the humans who farm it.

Ferrer extended his hand over the waters, sparkling in some of the city’s plentiful sunlight. “Look at it now: Can you imagine it gone? No, you can’t. But it almost, almost went away.”

There is this sense in Valencia generally, that the good stuff almost went away, but it somehow didn’t. Some of what the Moors contributed to the local mix – citrus, paella rice, water laws – remained after their expulsion. Some civic pride survived the Franco era. Out of a cataclysmic flood came a new park. After the Valencia visit, I found the now idyllic hillside in Andalusia where my antifa Great-uncle Humfry fell to a sniper, a well-tended olive grove growing opposite the site of his last battle. But that, as they say, is another story.

If you go

Mellia Valencia Oceanic 4 this four-star, high-rise hotel is situated on the edge of the park on the old riverbed, it has a superb breakfast buffet and plenty of airy rooms with good views over the city. Rooms from $250.

Hospes Palau de la Mar. This luxury hotel arose from a sensitive conversion of a Victorian mansion. The restaurant, Ampar, run by chef Carlos Julián, is a destination in its own right. Rooms from C$400.

The writer was a guest of Visit Valencia, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.