Valencia

• 1. Introduction

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  Valencia stands on the banks of the Turia River, where Roman soldiers planted a colony in 138 BC and gave it a name meaning "strength" or "valour." More than two thousand years later, that colony has grown into Spain's third-largest city, home to 824,340 people and one of the busiest container ports on the Mediterranean. But the city's most striking quality is not its size or its port. It is the sheer accumulation of transformations layered beneath its streets. The same ground that once held a Roman forum was later a Moorish city called Medina at-Tarab, the City of Joy, then a Christian kingdom, then a centre of the global silk trade, then a provisional wartime capital, all before becoming a host city for the America's Cup and winner of the title of European Green Capital 2024. What shaped Valencia into a city that keeps reinventing itself? And what does it cost a place to survive that many upheavals?

• 2. A Name Built on Valour

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  The Roman historian Livy recorded that the founding of Valentia in the 2nd century BC was a reward for soldiers who had fought against a Lusitanian rebel named Viriatus during the Third Raid of the Lusitanian War. The Romans had a custom of honouring veteran soldiers by granting them a settlement, and they named the place accordingly. Valentia, in Latin, carried the explicit meaning of strength or valour. That original meaning encoded military service into the city's identity from its first days.

  The name that emerged from centuries of spoken language became two distinct words. In Castilian Spanish it settled into Valencia, while in the Valencian language it became a slightly different sound, Valencia. The Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, the official language body, approved the Valencian spelling after a formal debate. Since 2017, that Valencian spelling has been the only officially recognised name of the city. A further debate reached the municipal council as recently as 2023, when a proposal was tabled for a dual official denomination, though the matter remained unresolved.

  During the centuries of Islamic rule, the city was known by an entirely different name. Arabic speakers called it Medina at-Tarab, meaning City of Joy according to one transliteration, or Medina at-Turab, meaning City of Sands, according to another. The second reading made geographical sense: the city sat on the sandy banks of the Turia. Meanwhile an Arabised variant of the Latin name, Balansiyya, circulated as well, though it is not clear whether that name referred to the city itself or to the wider Taifa of Valencia that surrounded it.

• 3. Conquest, Reconquest, Pogrom

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  On the 28th of September 1238, King James I of Aragon obtained the surrender of Valencia after laying siege to it with an army of Aragonese, Catalans, Navarrese, and crusaders from the Order of Calatrava. Fifty thousand Moors were forced to leave the city. The conquest marked a turning point, and James I turned it into the capital of a new political entity, the Kingdom of Valencia. The Jewish population was afforded a quarter for residence the following year, surrounded by a high wall built in 1390, with three gates that were closed at night and a cemetery just beyond the Portal dels Jueus, the Jew's Gate.

  The 14th century brought catastrophe. The Black Death struck in 1348 and was followed by years of fresh epidemics, wars, and civil unrest. Then, in 1391, a pogrom swept through the Jewish quarter. The assault was sparked when a procession of youths marched on the quarter shouting that the Archdeacon of Castile was coming with his cross and that all Jews should be baptised or die. Royal guards attempted to intervene and failed. Thousands of Jews were murdered, and the survivors were forced to convert. The Jewish quarter was destroyed entirely.

  Despite the violence, the 15th century that followed was a period of extraordinary wealth. Genoese traders had already begun promoting the cultivation of white mulberry in the area during the late 14th century, introducing new silk manufacturing techniques that would soon transform the local economy. The Genoese community in Valencia became one of the most important in the Iberian Peninsula, alongside Seville's. Population grew rapidly, and by the end of the century Valencia had become the most populated city in the Hispanic Monarchy and second only to Lisbon on the entire Iberian Peninsula. The Jewish philosopher and financier Isaac ben Yehudah Abrabanel and his family departed from Valencia's port in 1492 among the Jews expelled from Spain, permitted to leave by special permission granted by King Ferdinand.

• 4. Silk, Crisis, and Catastrophe

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  The Genoese-introduced silk industry gave Valencia a second flowering in the 18th century, when the city replaced Toledo as the centre of silk manufacturing in Spain. The wealth it generated was visible in architecture: the Palau de Justícia stands as an example of the affluence of the most prosperous years of Bourbon rule, roughly 1758 to 1802, during the reign of Charles III. Enlightenment ideas found their way to Valencia through men such as Gregorio Mayans and Francisco Perez Bayer, both of whom maintained correspondence with leading French and German thinkers of the period.

  But the path to that 18th-century recovery had run through repeated disasters. By the late 1520s, Barbary corsair attacks along the Valencian coastline had intensified dramatically. North African piracy forced the fortification of coastal settlements and, combined with the shift of global trade away from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic, effectively ended Valencia's period of economic splendour. That piracy also encouraged the growth of Christian piracy, with Valencia serving as one of its main bases on the Iberian Mediterranean. The Berber threat did not substantially reduce until the 1580s.

  The deepest wound of the early modern period came in 1609, when the Spanish crown expelled the Moriscos, the descendants of Muslim converts to Christianity, from the kingdom. The Moriscos had been concentrated especially in the former Crown of Aragon and in the Kingdom of Valencia, where they constituted roughly a third of the total population. The expulsion caused the financial ruin of portions of the Valencian nobility and led directly to the bankruptcy of the Taula de canvi, the city's public bank, in 1613. A further blow arrived with the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1709. Valencia had backed the Habsburg claimant Charles of Austria, who had vowed to protect the traditional laws of the Kingdom of Valencia, known as the Furs. On the 25th of April 1707, after the Bourbon victory at the Battle of Almansa, Philip V ordered the Furs abolished as punishment. The ancient charters of Valencia were replaced by the Castilian system under the Nueva Planta decrees, ending the political and legal independence of the kingdom.

• 5. War Comes to Valencia

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  Napoleon's armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the early 19th century, and the Valencian people rose up against them on the 23rd of May 1808, inspired by leaders including Vicent Domenech el Palleter. The mutineers seized the Citadel and a Supreme Junta took over the government. Between the 26th and the 28th of June that year, Napoleon's Marshal Moncey attacked the city with a column of 9,000 French Grande Armee troops. He failed to take Valencia in two assaults and retreated to Madrid.

  Marshal Suchet began a long siege in October 1811 and forced the city's surrender on the 8th of January 1812. Under French occupation Valencia briefly became the capital of Spain when the Bonapartist king Jose I, Napoleon's elder brother, moved the court there in the middle of 1812. The French departure came after their defeat at the Battle of Vitoria on the 21st of June 1813, and Suchet's troops withdrew the following month.

  More than a century later, Valencia was at the centre of the Spanish Civil War. After continuous failed Francoist offensives against besieged Madrid, the Republican government relocated to Valencia on the 6th of November 1936, making it the provisional capital of Republican Spain. The city hosted that government until the 31st of October 1937. During the war Valencia endured 442 bombardments, carried out largely by the Fascist Italian air force alongside Francoist forces with Nazi German support. The bombardments left 2,831 dead and 847 wounded by official count, though estimates suggest the actual death toll was higher. Valencia surrendered to Nationalist forces on the 30th of March 1939. In the years that followed, speaking or teaching Valencian was prohibited under Franco's regime, and leading intellectuals such as Juan Peset, the rector of the University of Valencia, were executed; others including Josep Renau and Max Aub went into exile.

• 6. The Turia's Second Life

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  In October 1957, the Turia river flooded and killed 81 people, causing extensive property damage across the city. The disaster prompted a large-scale remodelling. Engineers created a new channel to carry the river, and the original riverbed through the city was left dry. That emptied watercourse became what the city calls one of its green lungs: a long park that now contains children's playgrounds, fountains, and sports fields. At one end sits the Palau de la Musica; at the other, the City of Arts and Sciences. The Valencia Bioparc zoo occupies another stretch of the same former riverbed.

  That complex, the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciencies, was designed by the Valencian structural engineer, architect, and sculptor Santiago Calatrava together with architect Felix Candela. It includes an opera house and performing arts centre, an interactive science museum built to resemble the skeleton of a whale, an IMAX cinema and planetarium, and L'Oceanografic, described as the largest aquarium in Europe. Calatrava also designed the bridge that bears his name in the city centre.

  The flood's legacy extended beyond parks and buildings. The city's population had declined in the difficult postwar years, but by the early 1960s the economy had begun recovering and Valencia experienced rapid population growth driven by workers drawn to jobs created through major urban and infrastructure projects. The foreign-born share of the population grew from 1.5 percent in 2000 to 9.1 percent by 2009, with large increases coming from Bolivia, Romania, and Italy. By 2022, Valencia was voted the world's top destination for expatriates based on quality of life and affordability, a verdict that the city's designation as European Green Capital 2024 placed in a particular light.

• 7. Falles, Formula One, and the America's Cup

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  Every year from the 15th to the 19th of March, Valencia burns. The Falles festival traces its origins to the 18th century, when carpenters began burning waste planks and worn-out wooden objects on the feast day of Saint Joseph, their patron saint. Over time the wooden waste was dressed into figures, the ninots, which grew into elaborate satirical monuments depicting famous personalities and the events of the past year. In 1901 the city inaugurated prizes for the best Falles monuments, and neighbourhood groups still compete fiercely. On the night of the 19th, everything burns in an event called La Crema. UNESCO recognised the Falles as an intangible cultural heritage on the 30th of November 2016, and the festival had already been declared a Fiesta of National Tourist Interest in 1965.

  In 2003, Valencia was selected to host the America's Cup, becoming the first European city ever to hold the historic yacht race. The 2007 matches ran from April to July; on the 3rd of July, Alinghi defeated Team New Zealand to retain the cup. Twenty-two days later, the leaders of the Alinghi syndicate officially announced that Valencia would host the 33rd America's Cup as well, held in June 2009. The Louis Vuitton stage of the 2007 event drew 1,044,373 visitors and the America's Cup match itself drew 466,010 visitors to the port.

  Formula One came to Valencia's streets between 2008 and 2012. The European Grand Prix ran on a street circuit, placing Valencia alongside Barcelona, Porto, and Monte Carlo as the only European cities to have hosted Formula One World Championship races on public roads. The final race in 2012 saw Fernando Alonso win for Ferrari despite starting halfway down the grid. The football club Valencia CF added to the city's international sporting profile, winning La Liga six times including in 2002 and 2004, the year it also won the UEFA Cup, and reaching the UEFA Champions League final in both 2000 and 2001. The University of Valencia, founded in 1499, is one of the oldest surviving universities in Spain and was listed among the four leading Spanish universities in the 2011 Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities.