Valencia: the back story

About Valencia: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Valencia Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Valencia has lived from its fertile plain, the huerta, and its sea for more than two thousand years. Romans, Moors and the kings of Aragon each left their mark, the fifteenth century made it one of the richest cities in the Mediterranean, and a flood in 1957 set off the transformation that gave it the Turia Garden and the City of Arts and Sciences.

Valentia

Valencia was founded in 138 BC, when Rome settled veterans of its Iberian wars on an island in the Turia. Beneath the square beside the cathedral, the Almoina archaeological centre shows the Roman forum and baths, and the later Visigothic and Moorish layers, under a glass roof that lets you look down from the plaza above.

Balansiya and the huerta

Under Moorish rule, the city of Balansiya grew rich on the huerta, the irrigated market-garden plain around it. Its canals still water the fields, and the farmers who share their water still settle disputes at the Tribunal de las Aguas, the Water Court, which meets every Thursday at noon outside the Apostles’ Door of the cathedral. It is one of the oldest courts in Europe, and UNESCO inscribed it as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009. In 1238 James I of Aragon took the city and founded the Kingdom of Valencia.

A flood in 1957 gave Valencia a nine-kilometre garden and a city of the future.

The golden century

The fifteenth century was Valencia’s golden age. Merchants traded silk, ceramics and grain across the Mediterranean, and between 1482 and 1498 the master builder Pere Compte raised the Lonja de la Seda, the silk exchange, whose trading hall of spiralling columns is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Torres de Serranos, the great gate of the city walls, date from the end of the fourteenth century. Valencia was a city of writers too: the poet Ausiàs March wrote here, and in 1490 Tirant lo Blanc, Joanot Martorell’s chivalric novel, which Cervantes praised in Don Quixote, was printed in Valencia.

Silk and oranges

In the eighteenth century silk weaving was Valencia’s great industry, and the College of the Silk Art still stands in the old town. In the nineteenth century, oranges took over: shipped from the port to the rest of Europe, they paid for the Modernista buildings of the Eixample, the Estació del Nord (1917) with its orange-tree mosaics, the Mercado de Colón (1916) and the Mercado Central, opened in 1928 under its glass domes.

The river

On 14 October 1957 the Turia burst its banks and flooded much of the city. Afterwards, Valencia diverted the river south of the city in a new channel, the Plan Sur. The question was what to do with the dry riverbed. Valencia chose to make it a park: the Turia Garden, about nine kilometres of gardens, sports grounds and paths crossed by the old stone bridges, opened in stages from the 1980s. At its eastern end, Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela built the City of Arts and Sciences, which opened between 1998 and 2005.

Valencia today

Valencia hosted the America’s Cup in 2007 and 2010, which reshaped the port into today’s Marina, and in 2024 it was the European Green Capital. The Roig Arena, a 15,600-seat arena for basketball and concerts, opened in September 2025, and Valencia CF’s new stadium, the Nou Mestalla, is under construction, with the club aiming to open it in the summer of 2027.

The Holy Chalice

In a Gothic chapel of the cathedral, behind glass, stands the Santo Cáliz, an agate cup venerated as the Holy Grail and kept in the cathedral since 1437. Archaeologists, judging by its style and workmanship, have placed the cup in the centuries just before Christ and attributed it to a workshop in the eastern Mediterranean; it has never been scientifically dated. The gold mount, handles and foot were added in the Middle Ages.

Our advice: begin at the Almoina, cross to the cathedral for the Holy Chalice (and, on a Thursday at noon, the Water Court), walk to the Lonja and the Mercado Central, then follow the Turia Garden east to the City of Arts and Sciences. Two thousand years, mostly in the shade.

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