Sunny Valencia

Thursday, January 31 – The weather has been fine here in sunny Valencia, no complaints. We haven’t done a lot.

On Monday, we went for a walk after lunch into and through the centre, initially in search of some remembered landmarks, later aimlessly. We found Plaza Redondo, a small courtyard among surrounding buildings. It’s near the central market. There are craft stalls here but, being Spanish lunchtime, most were closed.

We also (re)found the City Museum which is housed in an attractive 17th century palace, variously referred to as the Palacio de los Condes de Berbedel and the Palau del Marqués de Campo – not sure why it has two names. It includes a hodge-podge of historical and archaelogical exhibits. We thought of revisiting it, more to see the lovely palace itself again. It’s on a very posh square across from the residence of the archbishop of Valencia. In the end, being cheapskates, we decided to wait until a Saturday or Sunday when it’s free.

I spotted this guy on a little side street near the central market, working in his studio attached to a shop selling fans. We've seen him – and I've photographed him – before, but it makes a good picture.

We walked on, through the edge of Carmén to the Turia park and went down into it. We found a bench in the sun just below the Museo de Bellas Artes, where we sat and read for almost an hour. It was out of the breeze, nice and warm. 

Karen reading

Vandalized sculpture in the park

We walked back through the centre, admiring the lovely architecture, especially the neo-baroque Bank of Valencia building on Carrer del Pintor Sorolla – which I was surprised to learn was built in 1942.

Unidentified building in centre

Bank of Valencia building

When we got back to Ruzafa, we found a seat outside in the sun at A La Fresca, just down the street from our flat, and had a beverage. In the sun.

Tuesday was to be our going-out-for-lunch day. Given our less than successful experience in Ruzafa the week before – at the Turkish restaurant – we decided to try Carmén, a neighbourhood where we’ve found good value and selection in the past. We set out walking. It felt cold, although it was well into double digits Celsius. The breeze chilled us. We’ve become acclimatized to warmth.

There was a place near Plaza Tossal we’d liked on other occasions. We found it, but it appeared to have changed hands, and no longer offered a fixed-price menu del día. The next idea was Plaza de Carmén where we’d also eaten a few times.

We had some difficulty finding it. By the time we did, it was after 2:30 and we were starving. We chose the first place we came to, right on the square, one we’d eaten at a couple of times before. It’s called María Mandiles and bills itself as a place for authentic home-made Valencian food, comfort food. It does have a homey atmosphere. The food is fairly basic, but good value. We had pork chops with a potato and cheese casserole for mains. Karen had a Russian salad – creamy potato salad, not my taste – and I had cream of vegetable soup for starters. Dessert was an apple cake-tart thing. Beer and wine included: €9.85 each. I’m pretty sure the price has gone up 85 cents since we were here three years ago. Outrageous!

Carmén street art

Of course, I found more street art to photograph on the way home, most of it in a little square a block from Plaza de Carmén. And streetscapes.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we were determined to get out in the morning for a change and see something before everything closed up for siesta. We decided on a return to the Fondación Bancaja. There are three or four exhibitions on at any one time, only one of which we’d seen – on the Spanish sculptor Alfaro. We set out about 10:30 and walked straight down Avenida de Colón, the big shopping street. It’s always busy.

We ended up seeing Picasso: The joy of life. Bancaja has a thing for Pablo. I believe they own a lot of his work. We’ve seen a couple of Picasso shows here in the past. This one included some paintings and some ceramic ware. Some of the material they had borrowed from other institutions. Most of the pieces, though, were the etchings and lino blocks that Bancaja owns – and that Karen and I have both come to love, mainly from seeing them here.

The idea for the show starts with a quote from Picasso: “All the things I do in relation to art give me great joy.” The curator has chosen works he thinks reflect that joie de vivre – la alegría de vivir in Spanish. They’re organized by the themes that inspired Picasso’s supposedly most joyous art, including Afrian masks, the circus, dance, the great masters of art, the bull and the minotaur. I particularly liked – again – the etchings from the Vollard Suite that he made in the 1930s. The subjects are mostly very sensual and dreamlike, including minotaurs cavorting with ladies.

We had been puzzled by the fact that one of the other advertised shows – of historical paintings on the theme of the expulsion of the Moors in the middle ages – was nowhere to be found. When we looked more closely at the posters for it, we realized they referred to another entrance on the other side of the foundation building, which we walked around and found. It’s interesting, the last time we were here, my impression was that Bancaja had pulled in its horns a bit on the cultural foundation front, wasn't doing as much. Now, it seems, it’s doing more than ever. Why don’t our banks do stuff like this?

Basílica San Vicente Ferrer

We walked back by a slightly different route, ending up on Ciril Amarós street again. We passed the Colón market and stopped briefly at the Basílica San Vicente Ferrer, an elegant neo-gothic affair built in the early 20th century. The last few times we were in the city, it was closed for renovations, with scaffolding all around it. Today it was open, so we went in. It didn’t hold us for long. Lunch beckoned.

  

Basílica San Vicente Ferrer

After lunch, we did a big shop at Mercadona. We had intended to go out for another walk later in the afternoon, but I got tied up finishing my column for EatDrink, and we never made it out.

Today dawned cloudy and has stayed that way so far, although we are promised sun at some point, and warm temperatures. We’ll get going eventually... 

Beachin’ It

Monday, January 28, 2019 – We’ve had three days of lovely weather here: sunny, with temps forecast at 19C or 20C but going higher. We rode bikes down to the water Friday and Saturday.

On Friday, we grabbed Valenbisi bikes on Peris y Valero (major east-west artery with bike path a couple of blocks over from our flat) and rode right to the beach, dropping the bikes near the Neptuno Hotel. The season’s first sand castle builder was out with an elaborate architecture of spires and battlements. We remember coming to the beach in January the first two times we were here – 2011 and 2012 – and it was almost empty, even on nice days. Later in the year, it wasn’t even as busy as it was this Friday. There were several games of beach volleyball going on, people sunbathing, surfers in the water, lots of walkers and cyclists. The bars and restaurants were busy. It’s not hard to see that tourism is picking up here. We’re also hearing more English spoken in the streets – Valencia region apparently has the largest expat British community in Spain – and more Russian too.

We walked along the promenade almost to the end, stopped for refreshment at a bar-restaurant across from the beach, and ended up staying for almost an hour, reading and watching the passing foot traffic. There was a guy with his kids flying a kite on the sand in front of us. The Dad was controlling the strings – it was clearly his toy. When I looked up at one point, one of the kids had completely lost interest and was just staring off into the distance. Don't blame him. It can’t be much fun if all you can do is watch your Dad fly the thing. An accordionist with a little amplifier tied to his bicycle came and played a couple of cheesy tunes, then went around asking for money. I felt mean not giving him any, especially since I couldn’t help tapping my feet to the music. The bar was expensive: €11 for two small beers and a glass of wine – €4 each for the beer! We’d paid less than €2 for a larger beer in Ruzafa a few days before. We walked back along the promenade and took the tram and subway home. Nice afternoon.

Saturday was almost as nice. We rode to the Grau tram stop near the Americas Cup complex, dropped our bikes at the Valenbisi station and walked into Cabanyal. This is the old fisherman’s barrio, with tiny houses on streets running parallel to the water. Small-time commercial fishing has pretty much disappeared and Cabanyal is now just a poor but characterful neighbourhood. There are some signs of gentrification, with the odd nicely renovated house, but there is also a lot of it that looks like slum.

Cabanyal

It was lunch time (for the Spaniards – we’d already had ours) and the streets were all but deserted. We came upon the odd restaurant with people sitting out. At one, there was a raucous party, with singing and dancing, but mostly it was pretty quiet. Cabanyal is a bit hit-and-miss visually. Sometimes, if you pick the right streets and the right time of day, you see interesting architecture – little houses with gaudily tiled fronts, for example – and lots of people about. On other occasions we’ve heard flamenco guitar wafting from inside the houses or, on one occasion, played by a guy sitting on his doorstep. But this day, it was a bust. We wandered for half an hour but didn’t see anything very inspiring.

Cabanyal

Cabanyal

So we walked the few blocks down to the beach – a totally different atmosphere – and walked back towards the marina. There is a long pier, or breakwater, that runs out from the southern end of the beach into the harbour. It goes out a little over a kilometer. We walked on the raised promenade as far as we could go, past a new restaurant/beach club. There was a big Maersk container ship docked near the end – not sure why it was there rather than in the container port a little further south. At the end of the promenade, we went down the stairs to ground level and walked back through the marina, past the rows of yachts and motor launches. Everything is more built-up here now – more restaurants in the marina, more bars, more paddle board rental places and sailing schools.

The beach on a Saturday in January

Maersk container ship at dock

Vel e Vent (Sail and Wind) building - left over from 2007 Americas Cup

We walked back almost as far as the old Port of Valencia building and checked out the cool new – since we were last here – sculpture of a sombrero-covered faceless head. Then we walked back up to Grau and caught the tram and then the subway home.

Sunday was another beauty – mostly sunny, 19-22C. We had lunch at home, then rode bikes from Ruzafa through the centre and down the bike path that runs along Carrer de Guillem de Castro, all the way to IVAM, the modern art museum. It’s free admission on Sunday. We’re slowly chipping away at the current exhibitions – of which there are four.

IVAM exhibit banner

IVAM porch

Today we decided on the “Inhabiting the Mediterranean” show, an elaborate, ambitious look at the ideal and reality of the Mediterranean experience – very political, very critical of modernity, of northern European colonization of southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The works on display are mostly contemporary photos, installations, drawings and paintings by artists from all over Europe and the Middle East. I liked some of the photography very much, the other stuff not so. There were also some ancient artifacts related to the themes. I think I enjoyed reading the very thoughtful curatorial notes, which had been translated into quite good English, as much or more than the actual art.

Yazan Khalili: large-scale hand-painted black and white photograph - lead image for exhibit

We walked back through Carmén and found more great street art. I would spend all my time in this neighbourhood – it's certainly the most interesting visually, with its narrow streets and alleys, and wall murals. It's a bit decrepit in places, but I've never felt anything but perfectly safe. Mind you, we don't often wander around here at night.

We came on one huge block that had been demolished. It looked like they were starting to build something else, or getting ready to start. In the meantime – and this is typical of Valencia – the street artists had invaded the building site and decorated the exposed walls of adjacent buildings. 

The thing about the narrow streets is that you're continually coming around corners and finding unexpected vistas - wall murals or ancient buildings looming up.

Catholic University of Valencia

We walked back through the centre, by the central market and into city hall square. There had been what looked like some kind of organic food fair going on. The tents were all being being torn down when we got there, but the streets around the square were still closed to traffic, and there was a drum band performing for a small crowd. We didn’t linger. 

Unidentified church behind Silk Exchange

Drum corp in city hall square

Central Market

We walked up along the tracks from Estación de Norte and into Ruzafa. Home.

Edge of Ruzafa

Edge of Ruzafa

Fun with postcards

Thursday, January 24, 2019 – My friend Mike Haas has a curious obsession. He discovered – how I don’t know – that many postal services no longer check that the postage on a mail item is legitimate. So he takes old stamps from his boyhood collection, including already cancelled stamps, pastes them on postcards and hands them to friends and acquaintances to mail back to him when they travel. It doesn’t matter that the stamps are of the wrong country or that they’re decades old, it’s amazing how often the cards make it back. I sent him one from Newfoundland with a pre-1949 Newfoundland stamp on it, which he received.

On this trip he wanted to try something different. He’s sending me postcards from home. We received one when we were in Scotland at Christmas. It was a 4x6 print of our team hockey picture. I like to imagine a Scottish postal worker puzzling over the picture of a bunch of grinning, padded geriatrics in ice skates! Clearly nobody looked at it, though. He’d used an old British stamp and a 1930s German stamp with a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Didn’t matter. I’m waiting for one to be delivered here in Valencia. I arranged with our landlady to get the key to the apartment’s mailbox so I could receive it.

I had thought of trying a variation on the game, counterfeiting a stamp of a fictitious country – Republic of Scotland, maybe, or República de València. (Both places are semi-autonomous regions with semi-serious separatist movements.) Alas, it’s more difficult than I reckoned to print a convincing-looking postage stamp on a home printer.

Next best thing: I picked up some old Spanish stamps at a flea market on Sunday and I’ll send Mike a postcard with a few of them on it. You can tell the bottom has fallen out of the philately market. I bought a package of 16 mint (unused) stamps dating from before Spain switched to the Euro in 1999 for €2.75 (about $4.25). I doubt I’d have paid much less 55 years ago when I was a collector. Here’s my card. Oh, yes, part of the game is that they’re always addressed to Mike’s cat, Tyger.

So that’s it. That’s how old farts fill their time when they’re not playing hockey or watching TV. Or rambling around Valencia.

Speaking of which, we rambled some yesterday. We had lunch out at a little Turkish place a couple of blocks away. Karen’s meal was okay – a nice salad with shaved meat on top, and for segundo, a plate of fries and little hamburger patties. Mine was disappointing: hummus for primero, nicely presented but sadly lacking any garlic flavour, and a doner wrap for segundo, also nicely presented, but with dried up doner meat and almost no flavour of any kind. The baklava for dessert was good. One drink included: awful wine – I generously gave mine to Karen and ordered a beer. Total: €20.75. I doubt we’ll go back.

Later in the afternoon, we went out with the idea of going to the Fundación Bancaja, the cultural foundation of one of Spain’s largest banks. It has art and music spaces in several cities. The one in Valencia is in a lovely old building in the centre, with three floors of display space. Admission is always free. We check it out every time we’re here. We’ve seen some fabulous exhibits, including one of Picasso prints in 2016. The foundation appears to have huge holdings of Picasso prints. Another year, we saw a very good, completely different Picasso print exhibit at the Bancaja centre in Sagunt, a small town near here.

Bancaja foundation building in Plaza de Tetuan

Getting to the foundation this time proved problematic. I knew approximately where it was. We headed in the general direction, over into the centre, then made the mistake of consulting Google Maps on the quickest way to get there. The app got confused. It took us in the exact opposite direction, dropping us in a backstreet in Carmén. I still don’t know what that was about. Or why we listened to Google when it was clearly sending us the wrong way. In any case, we used paper maps after that. It took awhile to backtrack and find it.

Andreu Alfaro

There are three exhibits on right now. The big one, the only one we took in on this visit, is a retrospective of the work of a mid-20th century Spanish sculptor, Andreu Alfaro (1929-2012). The English-language version of the exhibit guide claims he’s “one of the main Spanish sculptors of the 20th century,” but he doesn’t even rate an entry in the English-language Wikipedia. (He does in the Spanish.) I like sculptors from this period – abstract, often playful. Alfaro mostly worked in metals. Karen is usually not that thrilled by sculpture, but even she found quite a bit to like in this show, especially the late-period pieces in the Jazz and Angels series.

Andreu Alfaro

Andreu Alfaro

I ran this morning – down Regne de Valencia to the river, along it for a bit, then back up Marques de Turia. About 5K. Not sure what we’ll do this afternoon, maybe bike.

Later.

Nope, we didn’t bike. We walked, about two miles, right across the city centre to the river, and beyond, to a new (to us) art gallery called BombaGens. It’s run by a private family trust, La Fundació Per Amor a l’Art (Foundation for the Love of Art?), set up in the last few years and housed in an old factory that built hydraulic pumps. The site includes a bomb shelter that was used during the Civil War. (Valencia was one of the last strongholds of the Republic, and was bombed unmercifully by Franco’s Nationalists and their German allies.) The place has been beautifully renovated as an art gallery. There are temporary travelling exhibits, but the foundation also has a substantial collection of its own that it shows. Photography is a specialty.

BombaGens: inner courtyard and gallery entrance

Almost the first thing I saw when we walked in was a small selection of prints by Henri Cartier Bresson, one of my early photographic heroes – including some of his iconic images. It may be counter-intuitive to non-photographers, but seeing prints actually made by, or under the direction of, these artists is a totally different experience from seeing the images reproduced in a book. It’s like the difference between standing in front of a great painting and seeing a picture of it in a book.

One of the Bresson images on display at BombaGens

There were also selections of work by Helen Levitt, Paul Frank and other renowned street photographers of the mid-20th century – legendary names. There was a whole special exhibit of work by the American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, most taken in the mid-1960s when he was briefly living in Malaga. I even recognized some of the locales from our time in Malaga two years ago. For me, this was an incredibly rich gallery experience. There is much more in the main collection that I haven’t mentioned. I was suffering gallery fatigue within an hour – just too much to take in.

The other big exhibit on right now is of late-period work by a Norwegian/Swedish painter I’d never heard of: Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987). She had spent much of her artistic life as an illustrator and figurative painter, but discovered abstract art in the 1960s. I really liked some of it, Karen not so much. Still, I think we both enjoyed the visit. I’d go back in a shot. We’ll have to keep an eye on the website to see when new exhibits appear. 

Anna-Eva Bergman

We walked back along Carrer de Guillem de Castro past the massive Torres de Quart, the second of the two medieval gates still standing – the other is Torres de Serranos (shown in the postcard). They really are amazing monuments. They were built in the 1400s and still show the scars of shelling by Napoleon's forces in the early 19th century. Living history.

Torres de Quart