Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, has long been a sleeping giant. Sort of part of Catalunya, but not really, the city and its province, La Comunidad Valenciana, have a distinct dialect of Catalan to call its own and enough distance from celebrated Barcelona (the soul of Catalunya) to have developed its own traditions and cuisine. The arrival of the America’s Cup, the 32nd regatta that took place this year, and some examples of what writers now breathlessly call “signature architecture”—Santiago Calatrava’s L’Hemisfèric and L’Oceanogràfic (part of the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències; www.cac.es) in Valencia’s Tùria Park are to Valencia what Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim is to Bilbao and the same architect’s new Jay Pritzker Pavilion is to Chicago—have shaken awake this city of 800,000. (Its soccer team even won a couple of Spanish season titles a couple of years back, breaking the hegemony of teams Barcelona and Real Madrid, and that might have helped its renaissance along, too, and in 2009 the city will for the second time host the America’s Cup.)
Parts of the city are still bordered by a medieval wall, the most notable sections being the Torres de Serrano and Torres de Quart. Some traditions practiced still today hark back to this era. For example, every Thursday morning, at 11 a.m., the Tribunal de las Aguas (Water Council) sets up half a dozen or so wooden seats at the back of the city’s cathedral in order to listen to water disputes. Dressed in black robes and hats, these city elders weigh up the information presented before passing judgment, as they have done so for more than 500 years. Their decision is binding. When I was there, all was anticipation, and then anticlimax, as no aggravated farmers neared the dais brandishing papers and grudges.
“The Fork in the European Road,” an article in this month’s Car & Travel, outlines the renaissance in Valencia’s cuisine but does not touch on the city’s most-famous contribution to the pallet: Paella (please see the link on this page for a sample recipe). Its most important ingredient is a fat type of rice called bomba that is grown only in the Albufera marsh, southeast of the city and separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a thin strip of wooded dune. Bomba absorbs three times its weight in water and is responsible for the rice taste of the final dish, which is traditionally eaten on a Sunday by residents, but every day by tourists, who often have to call a day ahead to order it.
Laura Terenzi, manager of the Valencia outpost of upscale outdoor furniture company Unopiù, has her showroom close to the marsh. “The dish is cooked in a very large, shallow pan, and it must be done over a fire, preferably wood from the orange tree,” Terenzi says. (Orange trees abound in the south of Spain and provide glorious color during the winter.) “The best paella I have had comes from restaurant L’Alter in the town of Picassent, which borders the Albufera,” she adds. “There, it is made traditionally, and with it we drink a local red wine from the Utiel-Requena (www.winesofvalencia.com) region made from a grape variety called Bobal.”
More famous is 107-year-old Restaurante Nuptuno (www.restaurante-neptuno.com) in Valencia’s Malvarros neighborhood, close to the port where the America’s Cup was held. Huge and on the beach, the restaurant is where politicians, celebrities and notables, including King Juan Carlos, come for their paella fix.
“It is not a cheap dish, certainly if it is made well,” says Jaime Ortega Ortiz, who owns bookstore Ubik Books (www.ubikbooks.com; in Spanish only) in the city’s El Carmen area neighborhood, regarded as its hippest locale. He loves restaurant La Caragola—“caragola” is the word for “snail” in the Valencian dialect—on the Plaza de Mosén Sorell for food that is both good and very reasonably priced, although only on very rare occasions does it decide to prepare paella. “For a restaurant that always has paella, go to Casa Roberto, in the El Ensanche area,” explains Ortega. “But you should expect to pay about 60 euros (approximately $80) for two people. Paella is never prepared for just one person, always for at least two.”
Usually, the dish comes in three forms. The mixed-meat version contains chicken and rabbit, along with rice, vegetables, a type of large white bean and snails, which Terenzi asks to be not included, while the seafood version has mussels, fish and prawns. The last version contains only vegetables. Paella should contain no meat stock or sausage.
A trip to the Albufera marsh to see where paella rice comes from is a very worthwhile one. It takes about 30 minutes to drive there. The marsh is notable for its silence and thin, crisscrossing canals, punctured on occasion by a farm’s tower or silo. One thin road crosses the marsh, cars needing to give way to oncoming traffic at its small, steep bridges. Rare birds, such as the Black-winged stilt, pause here after flying over from Africa, and its village and towns, all on its outskirts, are seldom visited and maintain many traditional ways. Sollana is a small town that makes an interesting stop. Its neat central square and outlying streets hold a running-of-the-bulls festival in late August that is similar but not as grandiose as its more famous cousin in Pamplona, 250 miles to the north. I went there on two consecutive days, having decided I liked the place. On the second evening of the event, several bulls were led into the square, where the village’s Young Turks showed their daring by taunting the bulls and jumping out of the way of their sharpened horns. Crowds—nearly all locals—cheered from the temporary stands that had been built around the square’s edge. One athletic youth leapfrogged a charging bull, while holding a blazing torch in his hand. That was impressive and something that I did not need to remind myself never to try, and certainly not after reading that, during this year festival, a 26-year-old man was gored fatally.
The older residents did not come to the square, but rather set up tables and chairs outside their homes and ate paella. “Fa frett,” one woman said to us, complaining about the cold. In Spanish, that phrase would have been “hace frio”; in Italian, “fa freddo.” “Fa fret” therefore seemed more Italian that it did Spanish, a remnant that harks back to the days when Catalans and their language ruled over Sardinia in Italy, Corsica in France and other non-Spanish areas farther to the east. It was pleasant to hear this snippet of an uncommon language, and I now use it with the friends I was there with, instead of Spanish or English, smiling at the memory of its origins.
A small church stands out of the Albufera at La Muntanyeta dels Sants, but there is little else apart from peace and beauty on the route north from Sollana back to Valencia until you reach another small town, El Palmar. Its long, main street contains at least a dozen places to eat paella and sits beside the marsh’s sole lagoon. Boat trips can be planned that take you to see its wildlife and traditional houses, which now are fast disappearing. A few can be seen from the side of the beach road between El Saler, where Valencianos come to bathe in the sun, and El Palmar.
Finally, do not leave Valencia without trying its signature drink, horchata, or orxata in Valenciano. This drink served chilled is made from tiger nuts, which are not nuts at all, but a root, a tuber introduced to south Spain from Egypt by the Moors who invaded Spain in the ninth century and inhabited it until 1492 when they were expelled by the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. The drink does taste nutty. It also contains milk, cinnamon, sugar and vanilla and is superior, to my mind, than the similar but sweeter rice-based horchata sold in Mexico and many U.S. cities in which Mexicans have settled. It is perfect with a sandwich containing jamón ibérica de bellota, the most sought-after Spanish ham that is made from pigs who eat exclusively acorns (bellotas in Spanish). A pretty story, perhaps myth, surrounds the drink’s name. The one mostly told is how a young girl from Valencia served the drink—which locals also called chufa—to the Spanish king James I. She told him, “this milk is called chufa,” to which the king replied in Valencian, “Aixo no es llet, aixo es or, xata,” or in English, “This is not milk, this is gold, cutie.” A nice tale to remember during lunch.