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Published: June 28th 2013
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Valencia
View from Plaza de la Virgen We set off towards our next stop: Valencia, it’s quite a drive (around 460 kms) so we scheduled in a couple of stops along the way. We thought a stop in Alicante would be a good halfway(ish) point and Steve decided that we couldn’t pass so close to Benidorm without a stop there too, just to experience it first-hand! An interesting few days followed!!
I actually quite liked Alicante, it was fairly built up along the beach but not to the ‘high rise’ extent, some of the apartments and villas were quite attractive and there were hardly any of the expected tat shops, beach bars, restaurants etc., also, probably because we were still visiting early in the season, the beach wasn’t crowded. There’s a kind of pedestrianized promenade with nice white stone benches to sit down on and take some time to look at the sea. It looked clean and well looked after. The traffic along the seafront was fairly heavy with people trying to find beach parking, although we did visit at the weekend and I was surprised to hear many Spanish voices, expecting everyone to be British! Back at the campsite however, we had parked Petit Van Blanc
next to half a dozen vans belonging to the Spanish ‘branch’ of the UK Motorhome Club, meaning everyone was from the UK but now lived locally. The people were lovely though: inviting us to their paella making session that evening and their ‘pub quiz’ that followed. Unfortunately they also entertained us with horror stories of the scams that are pulled on motorhomes with foreign registration plates, with the intention of robbing them, on the road from Valencia to Barcelona (so much so that we almost decided to write off Barcelona as a following stop!).
After a couple of days of sunshine in Alicante, we knew we had to experience Benidorm for ourselves! Steve’s sister: Alisa, I hope she won’t mind me mentioning her, has spent some time living and working in the area and says that Benidorm is like Marmite: you either love it or you hate it! Well after our visit, I can safely say that I infinitely prefer Marmite to Benidorm!! I’m sure most people are already familiar with the skyline, but I wasn’t and now I am I can’t possibly describe it… I’ve included a photo as I just can’t find the
words! I did some research on line though, that told me the Mayor of the town, during the 1960’s, wanted the construction of tall buildings as it was the best way to accommodate the many visitors without ruining many square kilometres of fertile farmland. Apparently it was also this same Mayor who persuaded Franco to lift a ‘bikini ban’ in Spain so that holiday makers could enjoy the sunshine (and Benidorm) to its fullest.
I have no idea if the mobility scooter craze is due to the ITV Benidorm TV show or if the people who visit there have always favoured them as a mode of transport, but again, I was speechless to see kids, probably no more than 20 years old, humming along the pavements on them, rather than use their legs… some were even riding tandem scooters... it hurt my eyes! We returned to our campsite for the evening and visited the bar to use our two ‘welcome drink’ tokens and some long standing residents of the campsite invited us to their table for more beers and some inebriated conversation (them, not us!) which was a lot of fun; the woman who ran the bar was so
worse for wear that she had to be taken home, on the back of a mobility scooter no less!
We left Benidorm the next morning, under murky grey skies, the top of the hills obscured by heavy dark clouds and it began to rain as we hit the road to Valencia. The rain and the cloud soon cleared though and we arrived in Valencia ready for our next adventure.
We spent a couple of days exploring the city: to Plaza Redonda (once an abattoir!) where you can buy ribbons, buttons, lace and other locally made items, to Plaza de la Virgen where there’s an impressive fountain in the square outside the cathedral, to a café in Mercado de Colon (built in 1916 as a covered market place, now full of cafes) where we had our coffee with a side order of crappy attitude (the only low point and it made us giggle a bit really, to be fair the waitress was probably a bit fed up of English tourists sniggering over the fact that one of the sweet, doughy treats you buy with your coffee in Valencia are called 'fartons'😉 and we walked through a fantastic park: Jardines
del Turia. This park is 9 kilometres long and has been landscaped along the length of the River Turia’s former course. Apparently the river was liable to frequent flooding and after a flood in the 1950’s killed many people, the government decided to reroute the river in a different direction and the original river bed was filled in. The park is full of walking paths, cycle routes, trees, sports courts and pitches and sculpture. It’s a great walk!
For a really unusual day in Valencia, we visited the ‘Cuidad de las Artes y las Ciencias’, the centre of Arts and Sciences. This centre, on the outskirts of the city, comprises a science museum, a concert hall and modern art museum, botanical gardens and a huge aquarium, housed in four of the most innovative shaped buildings I’ve seen. It’s monumental! We spent the morning in the Oceanografic where there are tanks and pools of fish, mammals and birds from all over the world and the afternoon in the science museum which is almost totally interactive: you can play with voice distortion equipment, discover how long a human intestine is by pulling a long piece of red rubber tubing out of
a life-size model (yuk!), borrow super powers from the Marvel Superhero’s and a task where you challenge your opponent to move a little ball across a table using only the power of the mind! Absolutely cracking! To get the best out of the complex you would need a couple of days at least… but Barcelona called us!
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