Thursday, June 04, 2009

Valencia brief

Leea "Valencia condensada".

Holiday is over, and following my own custom here you have a chronicle about my misadventures.

The south of Spain said hello with a lot of sun, but not as hot as I was afraid. One can tell one is in Spain when the ground change it's color. Everything is dry yellow almost without green. There are some green in the extensive orange fields. The lack of green is a shock at the beginning, specially after Swedish summer, where green is all around.

Spanish architecture is hard to describe. You can see beautiful buildings in the mountains close to the sea, but surrounded by dry land anyway. It should be very hard to keep gardens in such a dry land, and even if there is a small one it always looks fake, as if it was planted in sand.

What is to be done in Valencia? Valencia is a nice city, with an old downtown which is gorgeous and good to walk. It is possible to go and go around without walking the same street twice, finding new, amazing places around each corner.

There is also a long park where there used to be a river, that was redirected after a flooding in the 50's. The old bed of the river is full of almost-green areas, bicycle and jogging paths and (of course) people willing to have a walk. As a funny detail we can see that the new bed is greener than the old one because it there is not actual river in there most of the year.

A mandatory visit is the "Science and Arts City", specially the Oceanographic park. The citadel was designed by Santiago Calatrava, a famous Spanish architect (just google him). The Oceanographic has several aquariums with species from all over the world. The entrance fare is 25 € that are really well spent.

Last, but not least, we have the Spanish food. Valencia is well known because of the paella, and it's impossible to go there and not having one. There is also mandatory to go for "tapas" and enjoy the sea food. There is no doubt Spaniards have a really good time with food.

I know it is a very short post, but as the title says, is just a brief.

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