Costa Valencia Travel Guide
2026 Edition

Valencia is the outlier among Spanish coastal destinations. While most costas are defined by their beaches, Valencia is defined by its city — Spain's third-largest, genuinely cosmopolitan, and one of the most liveable in Europe. The coast is almost incidental to its appeal, though no less good for that: the beaches at Malvarrosa and La Patacona are wide, sandy and easily accessible by metro from the city centre in fifteen minutes.

The city's claim to fame is paella — not the saffron-tinged seafood version exported around the world, but the original Valencian recipe: rabbit, chicken, ferradura beans, garrofón (giant lima beans) and local rice cooked over orange wood in a wide flat pan. It is Sunday lunch food, served at 2pm in restaurants around the Albufera lagoon. The lagoon itself — 20km south of the city — is a freshwater lake surrounded by the rice paddies that supply Valencia's kitchens, home to eels, coots, herons and flamingos, and reachable by boat or bicycle.

Santiago Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences complex at the eastern edge of the old Turia riverbed is the most distinctive piece of contemporary architecture in Spain — a sequence of bone-white buildings housing the Hemisfèric, the Museu de les Ciències Príncep Felip and the Oceanogràfic (Europe's largest aquarium). The old Turia itself, diverted from the city after catastrophic flooding in 1957, is now a 9km linear park running through the heart of Valencia — one of the world's great urban regeneration projects and the best cycling route in any Spanish city.