Category: Valencia

Burriana / Holidays / Valencia

Feliz Navidad – or Bon Nadal – in the Valencian Community

As lifelong Nebraskans, Doer and I tend to associate the holiday season with cold and snow. This year, we traded all of that in for sunshine and orange trees. And lots of life-sized nativity scenes, like the above display, which we came across in the city of Valencia. Though local Valencians have embraced their winter season with warm coats, hats, scarves, and gloves, most days Doer and I walk around in our mangas cortas  – short sleeves – and we’ve come to expect a refrain of, “no tienes frío?” (aren’t you cold?) wherever we go. Feels like spring break. The last

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Tourism / Valencia

Bioparc Valencia

We spent a weekend in Valencia with our rental car, taking in things we couldn’t get to by train, without having to worry about when the last train was. Besides the requisite tiki bar, we decided on our last day there to explore what you Yanks might call an open-air zoo. The Bioparc lives up to the promise: none of the animals are behind bars at all, and the environments seem pretty natural. Me? I enjoyed brushing up on my Spanish vocabulary, learning names of animals I probably would not know otherwise. I mean, doesn’t suricata just sound like it belongs in the middle of

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Strolling / Tourism / Valencia

Weekend in Valencia

Rental car in hand, a few weeks ago we decided to finally bite the bullet and spend a weekend in Valencia without worrying about train schedules and such. The big city is so close, yet so far away when dealing with public transit (just 1 hour from us). This time, we got a hotel for a couple of nights so we could really explore. One of the sights we’d been trying to see for a while now was La Lonja de la Seda (Silk Exchange), a mercantile exchange built between 1482 and 1548. The Gothic architecture is pretty stunning. According to Wikipedia (we

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Strolling / Tourism / Valencia

Sagunto: O’er the Ramparts We Walked

Each time Doer and I make the one-hour train journey between Burriana and Valencia, we peek out the window at the Sagunto stop midway through our route to catch a glimpse of the breathtaking Roman Iberian castle overlooking the city from a hilltop. A couple of weekends ago, we decided it was time to explore the ancient citadel. After disembarking, it didn’t take us long to decide to take a taxi for the very steep climb up to the castle. It’s very possible that our cab driver spends the better part of his shifts ferrying tourists to and from the castle

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Tourism / Valencia

City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia

A few weeks ago, we went to the Santiago Calatrava-designed City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. We’ve passed it on our commuter train journey into the city so many times, we thought it was high time we actually get out and look what was there. Besides crazy architecture and nice park space, there is water (fountains! waterfalls!) surrounding all the buildings: A science museum (which we went to this time) A performance space An oceanographic museum (which we will definitely be hitting soon) The world’s fanciest car parking garage It’s a pretty neat space, especially considering this is a

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Burriana / Castellón / Valencia

Spain, where a medieval walled village is just a short bike ride away

Last Saturday Doer and I explored the walled medieval town of Mascarell in our province of Castellón. This tiny hamlet is one kilometer from Nules, the municipality neighboring our own city, Burriana, and we reached it after riding about 25 minutes along a bike path, a route which took us past ceramic factories and orange orchards – the latter are about as common in the autonomous Valencian Community as corn fields are in Nebraska (maybe even more so). We encountered scores of other bicyclists along the way, leading me to safely assume that cycling through the countryside is a common weekend pastime here. The history

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