The best beaches in Valencia

Cabanyal, Malvarrosa, Patacona & La Devesa

Valencia is the perfect destination to live all that a millenary and changing city has to offer you, without giving up a beach vacation

Have you chosen Valencia because this year you wanted to do city tourism, without giving up your break facing the sea? Well, you’re in luck! Valencia’s beaches will surprise you!

The Cabanyal beach (Las Arenas)

This urban beach is located right next to “La Marina de València”, just five kilometres from the Town Hall Square and is very well communicated. There was formerly a private beach within it, but now it is public for the enjoyment of the Valencians and tourists.

It has a length of about 1,200 metres and an average width of 135 metres. So, despite being the most frequented, you will have no problem spreading your towel on its fine golden sand. In addition, if you prefer to lay under a beach umbrella or hammock, it also has this service. And for food or drink, do not worry! Known by the Valencians as the “Las Arenas” beach, it has a fantastic and traditional restaurant area with terraces that overlook the port and the northern part of the “Costa del Azahar”.

The Malvarrosa beach

A source of inspiration for numerous artists like the painter Joaquin Sorolla or the writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, the “Malvarrosa” beach is another urban beach treat for the visitor. In a way, it is still the extension to the north of “Las Arenas” beach, with the new neighbourhood’s special characteristics and range of the most widespread restoration.

If you like to do sports: play volleyball, soccer, shovels, or enjoy watching your kids climbing up fun ropes, come in at dusk and feel the sand’s coolness on your feet. Even during the day, the width of the beach will also allow you to practice your hobbies without disturbing or being disturbed by anyone.

And what to say about running on the shore, walking or biking along the promenade by the breeze! You have to experience it!

La Patacona beach

If you continue along the Malvarrosa beach to where the sand takes you, without hardly realising it you will have reached Alboraya, the Valencia’s bordering town that houses “La Patacona”. A beach of something more than a kilometre, also open and wide, in which it will not be difficult to contemplate mounted horseback strollers first thing in the morning.

The delight of this beach are the old houses facing the sea converted into restaurants that have been decorated with an exceptional taste. To move about there to eat, dine or have coffee, in one of the premises with outdoor and indoor terraces, will be a great discovery.

El Saler and La Garrofera beaches

To the south of Valencia, but within its municipal limits, is the “Devesa de La Albufera”. It is an unrivalled spot for dunes, fauna and vegetation of 10 kilometres in length and approximately one kilometre wide. There are six waymarked itineraries in it, differentiated by themes and colours, which together represent more than eight kilometres to journey.

Most impressive: its location between the Mediterranean to the East and the rice paddies and lagoon of “La Albufera” to the West. To combine a walk on this arm of paradisiacal land with a good dip in the beaches of “El Saler” or “La Garrofera” and a sunset in front of “La Albufera” will, as a result, be very energetic and romantic.

Valencia’s Marine

"La Marina de València" cannot be understood without the city’s history or the contribution of its people. From the sailors and fishermen from the maritime towns who have accompanied it since the existence of a small jetty raised nearly a millennium ago. From the farmers and businessmen promoting an exporting Valencia, whose time of splendour would be reflected in the modernist buildings that enclose it today. Of those who bet on the Valencian nautical industry until this portion of the port was fi with moorings. From the innkeepers who offer the best products from our land and our Mediterranean in a unique environment. Ultimately, from all the Valencians who welcome the traveller in a hospitable way.

It is located just 20 minutes away from the city centre by bus, metro or bicycle, and 15 minutes by car. In the Valencia’s marine the tourist will discover a sea of choices: concerts, exhibitions, play areas for children, restaurant business offerings, a beach club and nautical activities. In it you can walk, run or bike contemplating the old and modern buildings, like the emblematic “Veles e Vents”. You will step on the Formula 1 track circuit and admire the boats at a dock for megayachts, whose stimulus was due to the celebration of the 32nd America’s Cup at the end of the last decade.

“La Marina de València” is, therefore, a place where the traveller can enjoy a public space that is increasingly open to Valencians, the Mediterranean and the world. The Levantine horizon of the city merges with its beaches, under the key principle of respect for the environment.

Nautical epicentre

The visitor will find about 40 businesses for nautical services and activities in the Valencia’s marine, which include mechanics, painting, boat and jet ski repairs, rental and sales, and a long etcetera of complementary services. Around this industry, the focus on specialised professional training in this area is being developed.

Business ecosystem

Can you imagine being able to start up your business in an idyllic place? It is possible in the Valencia’s marine. With more than one million square metres, the largest marina in Europe also has a space where creativity and innovation are valued. It is committed to training, start-ups’ support, and sustainable enterprises development is stimulated.

Under the name of “Marina de Empresas” three institutions are positioned: Edem, the training school for entrepreneurs and managers plus the entrepreneurs and engineers’ university; the companies accelerator, Lanzadera; and Angels, the investment company that bases its decisions on the Total Quality Model.

Innsomnia is another wager on innovation based in this marine. It is the first business incubator specialised in Fintech in Spain.

St. Nicholas Church, "Valencia's Sistine Chapel"

When the restorer of the Sistine Chapel, Gianluigi Colalucci, contemplated the church of ‘San Nicolás’ in 2014 he could only exclaim: “Long live the Valencian Sistine Chapel!”

The St. Nicholas Church in Valencia is a 13th-century Gothic church located in the historical centre where Valencia was founded. The city was constituted by the Romans in the year 138 of our era.

Established as a parish in the place where a mosque previously existed, the church of ‘San Nicolás’ stands out for being one of the first 12 Catholic temples, subsequent to the conquest of King Jaime I.

During the fifteenth century, when Alfonso de Borja, rector of ‘San Nicolás’ and future Pope Calixto III, would encourage the enlargement of the apse and the feet of the parish to give it the structure and size maintained nowadays. However, the artistic wonder – that leaves parishioners and tourists who visit it speechless – would take place a few centuries later.

Baroque was imposed on Western culture at the end of the seventeenth century and every parish that appreciated itself had to follow that style. The paintings of St. Nicholas are commissioned by the fashionable artist of the time, Cordovan Antonio Palomino, who is committed to make designs of everything that was going to be painted, as well as to give it theological meaning. Due to Palomino’s overwork, the materialisation of such a work of art would be performed by his disciple, the Valencian Dionís Vidal. Self-portraits of both of them are on the right of the rosette, whose light is filtered reflecting a magical polychrome drawing inside the church. Palomino wears black, while Vidal, in the background, seems to show himself with the attitude of one who seeks the approval of his teacher.

The result: almost 2,000 square metres of stunning fresco painting, between the walls and the whole vault. The paintings of the central vault are divided into six lunettes on each side, North and South, in which the lives of ‘San Pedro Mártir’ and ‘San Nicolás’ are respectively represented. Everything in them is loaded with symbolism and elegance.

Of its architecture we highlight the Main Altar, it is also of Baroque style although more ornate. It was designed by Juan Bautista Pérez Castiel, one of the Cathedral of Valencia’s architects. In the Greater Altar, both Catholic saints are even in their Glory, upon reaching the end of their earthly life.

Return the colour to the darkened

The original paintings in the church of ‘San Nicolás’ were hidden by the passage of the years and, specifically, smoked by centuries of lit candles in honour of the diverse saints and images of the Virgin that lodges the parish.

After several previous restoration attempts, the Valencian institution “Fundación Hortensia Herrero”, at the beginning of this decade, made a commitment to return the original luminosity and colour to this century-old temple.

The restoration works were implemented between 2013 and 2016, in coordination with the Valencian Archbishopric and the specialists at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). Thanks to the use of innovative and complex techniques, they managed to recuperate the church of St. Nicholas’ artistic greatness. It also includes the architectural rehabilitation directed by Carlos Campos.

Once this first intervention was finished, the UPV remains in charge of pre-emptive conservation, through the use of sophisticated systems that even measure the environment’s humidity. Scaffolding and closed doors, that travellers can find these days in the facades and in the interior of the building, already correspond to a new stage of this church’s restoration which still holds many treasures to unveil.

The origin of Santa Claus

Perhaps because St. Nicholas is considered one of the Catholic saints protecting children, the life and worship of St. Peter the Martyr is relegated by the devotion that the Valencians profess to ‘San Nicolás’.

But the Valencians are not the only ones who pay homage to St. Nicholas. In this increasingly global world, thanks to which Valencia receives the visit of numerous foreigners, it is sometimes these same guests who better know the life of St. Nicholas, which Palomino and Vidal left expressed in their designs and paintings.

Saint Nicolas is the personality who distributes toys and happiness to many children of the world every year. In the present time, he comes to compete with the prominence of the Wise Men during the Spanish Christmases. As it is called and imagined in a part of the north of Europe, Santa Claus can be recognized in the second of the lunettes dedicated to this saint.

Other images such as that of St. Nicholas resurrecting three children boiled by an innkeeper, the high number of angels dispersed around different places of the church or the little ones placed at the feet of the saints, in the High Altar, attest to the importance given to the coming generations in this church.