वालेंसिया Audio Tours

Valencia has a particular talent for being underestimated. While visitors flood Barcelona and Madrid, this Mediterranean city quietly gets on with being one of Spain's most liveable places, with a genuinely intact old town, a working port, and a string of urban beach at Malvarrosa that fills up with locals rather than tourists every weekend from May through October.

The contrast between old and new is sharper here than almost anywhere.

Santiago Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences sits in the old Turia riverbed, a 9-kilometre green corridor converted into parkland after the river was diverted following catastrophic flooding in 1957. Walk from the Silk Exchange (La Lonja), a UNESCO Gothic masterpiece built in 1482, to the Hemisferic and the distance is barely twenty minutes, but the centuries stretch in every direction.