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, told in five chapters. Conquerors and poets, floods and rebirth. Sources: Wikimedia Commons.
For more than eight centuries Valentia is a Roman, then Visigothic, town: founded by veteran legionaries, razed by Pompey, reborn under Augustus, and finally a Christian bishopric as the Roman world fades into the age of the Goths.
The consul Decimus Junius Brutus settles some 2,000 veteran legionaries on a river island in the Turia, naming it Valentia Edetanorum, 'strength.' It becomes one of the oldest cities in Spain, planted on the road that will become the Via Augusta.
Valentia isn't planted at random: it sits directly on the Via Heraclea, the old coastal route down the eastern side of Iberia that Rome will soon rebuild as the Via Augusta, the empire's principal road to Gades (Cádiz). Surveyors lay a grid of streets around the new colony. The north-south cardo maximus survives today as Calle del Salvador, paved in grey-blue limestone above a working drainage system. More than 2,100 years before Valencia had a metro, it already had sewers.
Barely a generation after the founding, excavations at L'Almoina reveal proper civic infrastructure: Republican-era baths that Valencia's archaeological service considers the oldest known Roman baths in Hispania. Bathers move from changing room to warm room to a furnace-heated hot room, finishing with a scrape of the strigil, and next door stands a sanctuary built around the site's natural springs, a reminder that fresh water, as much as soldiers, decided where Rome put its new city.
Within decades of its founding, Valentia is minting its own bronze coinage, stamped with the city's name and the names of its local magistrates, a privilege Rome granted only to towns it judged genuinely established. The Republican-era ruins at L'Almoina also turn up a public granary (horreum), shops and administrative rooms: this is no army camp beside a river but a functioning Roman town with its own civic and economic identity, one that has barely sixty years left before Pompey burns it to the ground.
Valentia backs the rebel general Sertorius in a civil war against Rome, and pays for it. Pompey the Great destroys the city and leaves it abandoned for some fifty years before new colonists from Italy rebuild it grander than before.
During Diocletian's persecutions the deacon Vincent of Zaragoza 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.
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.
Five centuries of Al-Andalus. Now called Balansiya, the city is laced with irrigation canals and gardens, briefly seized by the warlord El Cid, and grows into a prosperous Muslim trading power, until the Christian conquest of 1238.
Valencia surrenders without a fight to the advancing Berbers and Arabs and is renamed Balansiya. Five centuries of Al-Andalus begin, and from the 10th century the city thrives as a Mediterranean trading centre.
Muslim engineers lace the plain with irrigation canals (acequias), turning it into a lush huerta of orchards and rice. The Tribunal de les Aigües that settles water disputes, still meeting on Thursdays outside the cathedral, is called the oldest surviving legal institution in Europe.
The Caliphate of Córdoba falls apart and Valencia becomes the seat of its own independent kingdom, the Taifa of Balansiya. A new ring of walls goes up around a city trading in silk, ceramics and leather, with paper made at nearby Xàtiva, and fragments of those walls survive among the houses of El Carmen. Outside them stood an old estate called al-Rusafa, which is why a district of Valencia is still called Ruzafa.
After a punishing siege, the freelance warlord Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, enters Valencia on 17 June 1094 and rules it as his own princedom, an unlikely Christian island in Muslim Iberia.
El Cid dies defending the city against the Almoravids. Legend, immortalised in the epic Cantar de mío Cid, says his corpse was strapped upright on his horse Babieca to lead one last, terrifying charge.
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.
James I's conquest founds a self-governing Kingdom of Valencia under its own charter of laws, Els Furs, an age of silk, banking, printing and a golden literature, lasting until Philip V abolishes it after the defeat at Almansa.
King Jaume I of Aragon enters the city on 9 October, still celebrated as Valencia's national day. He founds the Kingdom of Valencia and grants it its own charter of laws, Els Furs.
The cool, sweet tiger-nut drink orxata de xufa, grown in the fields of Alboraya, becomes Valencia's own. Legend says King James I, handed a cup by a village girl, exclaimed “Això és or, xata!”, meaning “That's gold, lass!”, and so gave the drink its name.
As Christian Valencia outgrows the old Muslim-era city, work begins on an enormous new wall, nearly four kilometres of ramparts studded with major gates: Serranos, Quart, Sant Vicent, Porta de la Mar and more. For the next five centuries this line decides where Valencia physically ends; everything beyond it is still fields and orchards.
Valencia's Gothic cathedral rises over the great mosque (which itself stood over a Roman temple), crowned by the octagonal Micalet bell tower. In a side chapel it guards the Santo Cáliz, an agate cup long venerated as the Holy Grail; its bowl has been dated to between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD, and is thought to come from a workshop somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.
On Sunday 9 July a crowd breaks into the jueria, the walled Jewish quarter that stood around what is now the Plaça de la Reina. The death toll is disputed, from the hundred-odd counted in letters written at the time to the 230 of later accounts. Between 2,500 and 3,000 Valencian Jews accept baptism to survive; about two hundred keep their faith and leave, most of them for Sagunt. The Major Synagogue, opposite the Palau dels Català de Valeriola, becomes the church of Sant Cristòfol. Twenty men are arrested for the killings and five are executed, some twenty-eight years later. The aljama of Valencia never reopens.
The city opens the Taula de Canvis, a municipal deposit bank that underwrites Valencia's booming Mediterranean trade, among the earliest public banks anywhere in Europe.
On his way to preach in the cathedral on 24 February, the Mercedarian friar Joan Gilabert Jofré sees a group of boys stoning a madman in the street. He drops his prepared sermon and argues instead for a house where such people would be fed and looked after rather than left to the crowd. A group of Valencian merchants pays for it within weeks. The Hospital dels Ignoscents, Folls e Orats is generally counted as the first psychiatric hospital in the world.
A press in Valencia turns out Obres o trobes en lahors de la Verge Maria, the earliest known book printed in Spain, barely twenty years after Gutenberg. The city becomes a cradle of Iberian printing.
Work begins on La Llotja de la Seda, 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.
Joanot Martorell's Valencian chivalric novel is printed, a book Cervantes would later call “the best in the world.” With the poet Ausiàs March, it crowns Valencia's literary Golden Age, the Segle d'Or.
Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia in Xàtiva, is elected Pope Alexander VI, 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.
The Estudi General is founded, one of Spain's oldest universities and a beacon of humanism, law and medicine that draws scholars from across the Mediterranean.
The artisan guilds, the Germanies, 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.
King Philip III expels some 135,000 Moriscos, 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.
Plague reaches Valencia in the summer of 1647, after a very dry year. The magistrates are slow to act because the first to die are children and the old, and by October the city cannot bury them fast enough. When the jurats take stock the following March they report more than 20,000 dead. The epidemic burns itself out in February 1648. What is known about it comes largely from the Dominican Francesc Gavaldà, who lived through it and wrote his account in 1651.
In the War of the Spanish Succession, Valencia backs the Habsburg claimant, and loses. After the Battle of Almansa, the victorious Philip V abolishes Els Furs and Valencia's centuries of self-government.
Wellington's victory at Salamanca forces Joseph Bonaparte out of Madrid, and on 31 August Napoleon's brother enters Valencia with his court and his ministers, lodging in the palace of the Counts of Parcent. For six weeks the administration of his Spanish kingdom is run from here. He leaves again on 16 October. His authority was disputed and the rival Spanish government sat in Cádiz, so the title is a shaky one, but this is the first of two occasions on which the centre of Spanish power moves to Valencia.
In the rice paddies of the Albufera lagoon, farm labourers cook rice with rabbit, snails and beans over an open fire in a wide flat pan, the paella. Valencia quietly gives the world its most famous dish.
Joaquín Sorolla is born in Valencia, the master of luminismo whose sun-drenched canvases of the city's beaches, fishermen and dazzling Mediterranean light make him Spain's most beloved painter.
The medieval wall is torn down so the overcrowded city can finally spread beyond its 14th-century limits. Civil governor Cirilo Amorós swings the ceremonial first pickaxe near the Porta del Real on 20 February 1865, timed in part to give work to thousands left jobless by the collapse of Valencia's silk industry. The Torres de Serranos and Torres de Quart are spared and still stand; the wall's old course can still be traced today along streets like Colón, Xàtiva and Guillem de Castro.
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez is born in Valencia on 29 January: novelist, republican agitator, founder of the newspaper El Pueblo and, more than once, a prisoner. He puts the huerta and the Albufera into literature with La barraca and Cañas y barro. Then he goes global. Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis, filmed in 1921 with Rudolph Valentino, becomes one of the biggest box-office successes of the silent era.
Spain stays out of the First World War and Valencia's huerta booms, its oranges and rice sold to both sides at soaring prices. The war reaches the coast anyway. Four German submarines work Valencian waters, and on 14 December 1917 U-64 torpedoes the British collier Coila and her 6,000 tons of coal, killing three of the crew. In Madrid the German ambassador uses the orange trade itself as leverage to keep Spain neutral. (When the 1918 flu pandemic strikes, neutral Spain's free press reports it openly, saddling the disease forever with the misnomer “Spanish flu.”)
After a decade of construction, architect Demetrio Ribes unveils Estació del Nord, a modernista love letter to the region in ceramic and iron. Orange blossom and citrus motifs climb the façade, trencadís mosaics cover the ceilings, and the entrance hall wishes every departing passenger "Buen Viaje" in a dozen languages.
Valencia's belle-époque boom crowns itself with the vast iron-and-tile Mercat Central, its ironwork, ceramics and stained-glass domes rising over stalls of fruit, fish and jamón. It's one of Europe's great fresh markets and a monument of Valencian Modernisme. The city just goes there to buy tomatoes.
As Franco's army closes on Madrid, the Republican government leaves for Valencia on 6 November 1936, and from the next day the city is the working capital of Spain. The government sits in the Palau de Benicarló, which houses the Valencian parliament today, the Presidency in the Capitanía General on Plaça de Tetuan, and the parties and unions take over the buildings along Carrer de la Pau. The Cortes meet first in the council chamber of the city hall and then, once the bombing damages it, in the contract hall of the Llotja de la Seda. For eleven months ministers, diplomats, journalists, soldiers and refugees fill the streets, until the government moves on to Barcelona at the end of October 1937.
Italian aircraft flying from Mallorca and warships standing offshore go after the port, the railways and the factories, and hit everything around them. On 15 May 1937 more than forty bombs fall on the centre, killing 53 people, eighteen of them in the Plaza de los Pinazo alone. Across the war the city counts somewhere between 500 and 850 dead, some 3,000 wounded and more than 800 buildings destroyed. Valencia goes underground: over 330 shelters, public and private, beneath schools, factories and streets. The one on Carrer de Dalt took 600 people and still carries the word REFUGIO in Art Deco letters above the door, and in 1938 the architect José Luis Testor builds one under the city hall for 700 children.
On 4 July the prime minister, Juan Negrín, opens the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in the council chamber of the city hall. Around 110 delegates from 28 countries have travelled into a country at war: André Malraux, Stephen Spender, Octavio Paz, Ludwig Renn and Gustav Regler among them, with Antonio Machado, Max Aub, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti, Josep Renau, Juan Gil-Albert and Ramón Gaya on the Spanish benches. The congress then moves to Madrid, Barcelona and Paris. Renn, who had come straight from the front, told the hall he had put down his pen because he did not want to write history but to make it.
As Madrid burns under bombardment, the Republic evacuates hundreds of the Prado Museum's greatest paintings to Valencia for safekeeping. The medieval Torres de Serranos are reinforced with concrete and turned into a fire-proof vault, Velázquez and Goya sheltering for months behind the same walls that once guarded the city's medieval gate, before the collection moves on toward Catalonia and, eventually, Geneva.
On 30 March, at nine in the morning, Colonel Aymat's occupation column takes formal control of Valencia. The day before, the aircraft overhead had dropped leaflets instead of bombs. What follows is counted rather than described. The city prison held 500 people before the occupation and 15,210 on 1 April. The first twenty death sentences are passed on 2 April, and 35,000 political prisoners go through the Model Prison in the next four years. On the wall at Paterna, on the edge of the city, 2,238 people are shot between 1939 and 1956 and buried in the mass graves of the cemetery there.
Franco's Spain sits out the Second World War as a non-belligerent, but victory brings the años del hambre, the hunger years. Food is rationed by cartilla and the black market thrives. Meanwhile the fruit keeps leaving the port: Valencian oranges are one of the main businesses of the German colony in Spain, shipped to a Germany under Allied bombardment until the trade thins out after 1942 and ends in 1944. The ration card is not withdrawn at home until 1952.
On 14 October the Turia bursts its banks in the Gran Riuada, drowning the city and killing around 80 people. The response is radical: engineers divert the entire river south of the city in the Plan Sur.
Twice in a generation, a pope celebrates Mass using the Santo Cáliz, the agate cup in Valencia Cathedral traditionally venerated as the Holy Grail, its bowl dated to between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. John Paul II uses it in November 1982, and Benedict XVI closes the World Meeting of Families with it in July 2006, calling it "this most famous chalice."
A study out of the Polytechnic University measures 31 streets in the centre and reports several of them above 80 decibels for twelve hours a day, with Guillem de Castro, Sant Vicent Màrtir, Gran Via de les Germanies and Quart among the worst. The conclusion, repeated ever since, is that Valencia may be the noisiest city in Europe. A La Caixa survey in 2003 puts the average across the road network at 73.3 dBA: a third of the measured points above 75, one percent below 65. Normal conversation runs at about 60, and the scale is logarithmic.
After the 1957 flood, engineers drain the Turia's old course through the city, but for years the plan is to pave it into a motorway. Citizens fight for a green space instead, and win: the riverbed reopens as the Jardí del Túria, a 9-km ribbon of parks, fountains and playing fields. Valencians still say "meet me by the river" and mean the gardens. The Turia hasn't actually flowed through the city centre in decades.
In the old riverbed, Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava's gleaming white complex begins to rise with the opening of the Hemisfèric. The futuristic science-city will redefine Valencia's image to the world, and cost four times its budget. → The full story: The City of Arts and Sciences. Valencia
On 3 July a Line 1 train takes the curve into Jesús station far too fast and derails underground. 43 people are killed and 47 injured, the worst metro accident Spain has had. The official account is driver error, and it stands for years. The families keep the case open through two parliamentary commissions and three judicial investigations, until thirteen people are finally identified as responsible and four are convicted.
Valencia hosts sailing's oldest trophy, the first America's Cup held in Europe in 150 years. The tired port is reborn as a sleek marina, turning the city back toward its sea.
UNESCO lists the Fallas: every March the city fills with giant satirical papier-mâché ninots, ear-splitting midday mascletà fireworks, and a final night when the towering monuments are set ablaze, the cremà.
On 29 October a catastrophic DANA (‘cold-drop') storm dumps a year's rain in hours, and flash floods tear through the towns south of the city, killing more than 220 people, Spain's deadliest flood in generations.
Named European Green Capital 2024, 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.