From a Roman colony of retired soldiers to Calatrava's city of the future — more than 2,100 years of Valencia in a single thread. Conquerors and poets, a warlord and a pope, silk and paella, floods and rebirth: the making of a Mediterranean city, told in five chapters. All images are openly-licensed (Wikimedia Commons).
<p>The consul <strong>Decimus Junius Brutus</strong> settles some 2,000 veteran legionaries on a river island in the Turia, naming it <em>Valentia Edetanorum</em> — 'strength.' It becomes one of the oldest cities in Spain, planted on the road that will become the Via Augusta.</p>
<p>Valentia backs the rebel general Sertorius in a civil war against Rome — and pays for it. <strong>Pompey the Great</strong> destroys the city and leaves it abandoned for some fifty years before new colonists from Italy rebuild it grander than before.</p>
<p>During Diocletian's persecutions the deacon <strong>Vincent of Zaragoza</strong> is brought to Valencia, tortured and killed for refusing to renounce his faith. He becomes the city's patron saint; a Roman street and prison linked to him still survive beneath the old town.</p>
<p>As Roman power collapses, the Church fills the vacuum and Visigothic troops garrison the city. Valencia becomes an episcopal see, and a Christian cathedral rises over the old Roman forum.</p>
<p>Valencia surrenders without a fight to the advancing Berbers and Arabs and is renamed <em>Balansiya</em>. Five centuries of Al-Andalus begin, and from the 10th century the city thrives as a Mediterranean trading centre.</p>
<p>Muslim engineers lace the plain with irrigation canals — <em>acequias</em> — turning it into a lush <em>huerta</em> of orchards and rice. The <strong>Tribunal de les Aigües</strong> that settles water disputes, still meeting on Thursdays outside the cathedral, is called the oldest surviving legal institution in Europe.</p>
<p>After a punishing siege, the freelance warlord <strong>Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar — El Cid</strong> — enters Valencia on 17 June 1094 and rules it as his own princedom, an unlikely Christian island in Muslim Iberia.</p>
<p>El Cid dies defending the city against the Almoravids. Legend — immortalised in the epic <em>Cantar de mío Cid</em> — says his corpse was strapped upright on his horse Babieca to lead one last, terrifying charge.</p>
<p>El Cid's widow Jimena can hold Valencia no longer. As the Christians abandon the city they set it ablaze, and Balansiya passes back into Muslim hands for another 136 years.</p>
<p>King <strong>Jaume I of Aragon</strong> enters the city on <strong>9 October</strong> — still celebrated as Valencia's national day. He founds the Kingdom of Valencia and grants it its own charter of laws, <em>Els Furs</em>.</p>
<p>Valencia's Gothic cathedral rises over the great mosque — which itself stood over a Roman temple — crowned by the octagonal <strong>Micalet</strong> bell tower. In a side chapel it guards a 1st-century agate cup long revered as the <strong>Holy Grail</strong>.</p>
<p>The city opens the <strong>Taula de Canvis</strong>, a municipal deposit bank that underwrites Valencia's booming Mediterranean trade — among the earliest public banks anywhere in Europe.</p>
<p>A press in Valencia turns out <em>Obres o trobes en lahors de la Verge Maria</em> — the earliest known book printed in Spain, barely twenty years after Gutenberg. The city becomes a cradle of Iberian printing.</p>
<p>Work begins on <strong>La Llotja de la Seda</strong>, a Gothic masterpiece whose hall of spiralling stone columns became the temple of the silk trade and the Consulate of the Sea. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the emblem of Valencia's Golden Age.</p>
<p>Joanot Martorell's Valencian chivalric novel is printed — a book Cervantes would later call <em>“the best in the world.”</em> With the poet Ausiàs March, it crowns Valencia's literary Golden Age, the <em>Segle d'Or</em>.</p>
<p>Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia in <strong>Xàtiva</strong>, is elected <strong>Pope Alexander VI</strong> — the most infamous of the Renaissance popes and father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. A second Valencian, his uncle Calixtus III, had already worn the tiara.</p>
<p>The <em>Estudi General</em> is founded — one of Spain's oldest universities and a beacon of humanism, law and medicine that draws scholars from across the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>The artisan guilds — the <em>Germanies</em> — rise against the nobility in one of Europe's earliest anti-feudal revolts. The rebellion is crushed by 1522, but its memory lingers in the city's fiercely independent spirit.</p>
<p>King Philip III expels some <strong>135,000 Moriscos</strong> — a third of the kingdom's people — from Valencia. The masterly farmers and weavers gone, the huerta's fields and workshops fall silent for a generation.</p>
<p>In the War of the Spanish Succession, Valencia backs the Habsburg claimant — and loses. After the <strong>Battle of Almansa</strong>, the victorious Philip V abolishes <em>Els Furs</em> and Valencia's centuries of self-government.</p>
<p>In the rice paddies of the <strong>Albufera</strong> lagoon, farm labourers cook rice with rabbit, snails and beans over an open fire in a wide flat pan — the <em>paella</em>. Valencia quietly gives the world its most famous dish.</p>
<p>The medieval ramparts are demolished so the overcrowded city can finally spread beyond its 14th-century limits — though the great gates of <strong>Torres de Serranos</strong> and Torres de Quart are spared and still stand.</p>
<p>Valencia's belle-époque boom crowns itself with the vast iron-and-tile <strong>Mercat Central</strong> — one of Europe's largest fresh markets — and the flamboyant Estació del Nord, monuments of Valencian <em>Modernisme</em>.</p>
<p>On 14 October the Turia bursts its banks in the <em>Gran Riuada</em>, drowning the city and killing around 80 people. The response is radical: engineers divert the entire river south of the city in the <strong>Plan Sur</strong>.</p>
<p>Rather than a motorway, the citizens win the drained old riverbed — reopened as the <strong>Jardí del Túria</strong>, a 9-km green ribbon of parks, fountains and playing fields looping through the heart of the city.</p>
<p>In the old riverbed, Valencian architect <strong>Santiago Calatrava</strong>'s gleaming white complex begins to rise with the opening of the <em>Hemisfèric</em>. The futuristic science-city will redefine Valencia's image to the world.</p>
<p>Valencia hosts sailing's oldest trophy — the first <strong>America's Cup</strong> held in Europe in 150 years. The tired port is reborn as a sleek marina, turning the city back toward its sea.</p>
<p>UNESCO lists the <strong>Fallas</strong>: every March the city fills with giant satirical papier-mâché <em>ninots</em>, ear-splitting midday <em>mascletà</em> fireworks, and a final night when the towering monuments are set ablaze — the <em>cremà</em>.</p>
<p>On 29 October a catastrophic <em>DANA</em> (‘cold-drop') storm dumps a year's rain in hours, and flash floods tear through the towns south of the city, killing more than <strong>220 people</strong> — Spain's deadliest flood in generations.</p>
<p>Named <strong>European Green Capital 2024</strong>, Valencia now mixes 2,100 years of history with cycle lanes, urban gardens and a booming creative scene — a resilient Mediterranean city rebuilding, once again, from the water.</p>