Shopping in Valencia – good fun

Valencia’s wonderful old Mercado Central offers a great shopping experience. The small stands stack an amazing array of fruit and vegetables, but for us, the "regional" products on display were the real highlights. We were impressed by the lines of cured hams and the beautiful wheels of sardines. Watching knowledgeable housewives seek out the perfect salt cod was fun, and finding the best piece is clearly very important.

Valencia’s main department store chain (Corte Ingles) also provided an unexpected highlight. In addition to picking up some food and fabric bargains to take home, we enjoyed wandering among the extensive array of traditional costumes on sale. These dresses really are beautiful, and we saw enough of them to realise that they are much more than museum pieces.

Corte Ingles also provided a great range of cheeses and ham slices for a great people-watching picnic, especially with crusty bread and a few olives. This was another unexpectedly enjoyable low-key highlight.

We really enjoyed sampling from Valencia’s variety of "fast-food" options. The taste of an orange picked from a tree was not a highlight, but the freshly-squeezed juice from a street-side café definitely was. We also enjoyed the thick, gooey hot chocolate and the special Mona de Pasqua cakes. Some crusty, meaty bocadillos for the flight home were also a highlight that lasted beyond Valencia. Excellent.

In between our forays to the Mercado and Corte Ingles, lunch at La Utielana was one of the highlights of our time in Valencia. It was a memorable local experience – with great food and a great atmosphere – and definitely worth seeking out.

Quick Tips:

If your time in Valencia is limited and you are there on a Monday, it is worth using this time to visit the Mercado Central and Corte Ingles (when most museums and large buildings are closed).

We do not recommend visiting Valencia’s other big market – the Mercado Colon. While it has been recently restored, it now feels more like a mall than a market.

Remember that most of Valencia’s smaller shops close in the afternoons, and most are also closed on Monday mornings.

If you have coffee or a pastry in a café, it costs a little more to sit at a table than to stand at the counter. The cost goes up a little more if you sit outside.

If you want a truly unique Valencian souvenir, pick up a traditional dress from upstairs at Corte Ingles. Even better, you can also buy rolls of material from which the dresses are made. Then you can make your own.

Best Way To Get Around:

We used taxis in Valencia more than we had expected. They are cheap and honest, and the most stress we had was when jostling for a cab with queue-jumping fellow shoppers on Calle Colon. But this only took a couple of minutes.

We took cabs to (9€) and from (12€) the airport. The journey each way took about 20 minutes, and we found this to be the best way of getting there. There is a train that goes to the airport, but apparently the airport stop is some distance from the airport terminal itself.

Valencia has an efficient public transport system. The reasonably extensive metro skirts the old town, and we used city buses (1€ per trip; buy tickets from the driver) on a couple of occasions.

In old Valencia, walking is definitely the best way to get around. There are plenty of small things to see and experience, and many of the streets are narrow and winding, making driving impractical anyway.

Having had fun at the Mercado Central, we dawdled in the general direction of the Corte Ingles department store on the edge of the old town. Skirting the crowds starting to gather for the daily 2pm Mascleta firecracker display, we came across La Utielana on a small street off Calle Poeta Querol. We got there just as the firecrackers started a few blocks away, and we could hear the muffled bangs from our table.

La Utielana was already buzzing when we arrived. Ten minutes later (after the end of the Mascleta), there was a queue of people waiting for tables. We felt pleased with ourselves and settled in for a fun, good-value lunch experience. We started with a shared plate of marinated vegetables – mainly beans, with some artichokes and big capers lurking among them. I enjoyed that and followed it with a prawn tortilla. This tortilla was thin and tasty – unlike the thicker (but also delicious) quiche-like variety I tried at the Meson Elisa restaurant around the corner (see separate journal entry). For her main course, Tina went for the arroz abanda. This was mainly yellow paella rice, with a token prawn in the middle. The rice was firm and slightly burned, and it was delicious. Highly recommended.

For dessert, Tina tucked into a fresh pineapple slice. This looked delicious and a much better choice than my cream pie with a topping of lemon flavouring. La Utielana does not serve coffee, but bubbly water did fine to end off the meal.

For its decor, La Utielana has a couple of interesting murals – painted in 1953 and including a beautiful and slightly surreal horse – and plenty of blue-and-white wall tiles. There are about 10 tables, the tablecloths are paper, and the service was friendly and (in our case) patient. With no English being spoken, we got by with our pidgin Italian and enjoyed ourselves very much.

La Utielana does not take AMEX. It does take VISA, although the machine did not accept any of our array of VISA cards. Leaving Tina as a hostage, I found a bank machine down the street and paid our bill with cash. Our total bill (including a beer) came to 19€. We thought that this was a very good value.

In our experience, La Utielana is definitely worth seeking out. Its entrance is through a small courtyard off the street, and it appears that its clientele is local and regular. It was a great place to enjoy a bustling, noisy weekday afternoon lunch.

The Mercado Central is in old Valencia, across the street from the beautiful old Lonja silk exchange. Passing the coin-traders and stamp-sellers in front of the Lonja, we were led into the Mercado by the excellent metal parrot perched on the centre of its roof.

We visited the Mercado on a Monday morning, when most of Valencia’s other major buildings are closed. It is a wonderful old wrought-iron cage with glass walls, a roof, and an energetic buzz of selling activity. The main selling area is given over to a fantastic array of fruit and vegetables, with some cured meats and jarred foods having a smaller slice of the space available.

Having bought a couple of oranges (navel variety, not Valencian) to munch on, we enjoyed wandering among the small stands. While the displays of fruit and vegetables were very impressive, we found the cured ham and salted cod stands to be the most interesting. The ham hangs in stacked rows – making the whole stand seem to glow a reddish-brown – and is certainly an evocative sight.

We enjoyed watching little old ladies selecting salted cod from the stand selling cod and olives. There appeared to be a special on Labrador cod, but this definitely did not deter customers from making sure they (eventually) found the very best piece from the stack on sale. To my untrained eye, it appears that skin is definitely a good thing when choosing a prime piece of salt cod.

With the Mercado being big, there is enough space for a separate fresh-fish section. By the time we got there (around noon), most of the stands in this area had closed shop for the day, but there were still a few prawns and small fish on sale. We also enjoyed seeing the displays of sardines in the main market hall – arranged in wheels and looking a bit like fishy sunflowers.

The Mercado closes at around 2pm. There are signs around it advising that it is about to be "restored" – hopefully the current vibrancy will be retained. We also visited Valencia’s other large market – the Mercado Colon. This market has been recently restored. The brickwork and structure are beautiful, but it felt more like a mall than a market to us. We definitely preferred our visit to the Mercado Central.

Tel: 96 315 9500

Website: www.elcorteingles.es

Corte Ingles is the leading department store chain in Valencia (and presumably in Spain). Our Valencia city map was sponsored by Corte Ingles, so we could see exactly where its four city-centre branches were when we needed some retail therapy.

We visited Corte Ingles with the intention of buying some durable groceries to take home. We visited the branch at Pintor Sorolla 26 on a Monday afternoon, when most of Valencia’s other tourist attractions are closed to visitors. It was time well spent, and we were persuaded to spend more than we had expected to.

The Corte Ingles grocery is on the fifth floor. Here we stocked up on olive oil and marconas (delicious salted almonds that are sometimes served with tapas). We were then drawn to the delicatessen by the impressive display of hanging hams. Here we tested the patience of the friendly server by picking up an array of delicious ham slices, a couple of cheeses, and some fresh bread for a picnic.

Also on the fifth floor, Tina noticed the "promotions" section of the store. It appears that Corte Ingles groups all its bargain items in the same place, and this is not obvious to the uninitiated visitor to the lower floors of the store (where most of the clothes are). Tina found some inescapable bargains (24€ for some trousers) and was happy. It was a good find.

The fifth floor also houses my favourite part of Corte Ingles – the traditional costumes section. Here we found an impressive array of the traditional "princess" dresses that we had seen being worn at Fallas events around the town. They are available in a range of sizes and prices, and they totally overshadow the rather puny waistcoats on sale for the men. For keen sewers, the material that goes into these beautiful dresses is also on sale.

We enjoyed our visit to Corte Ingles. We were happy with our purchases, and the tourist attraction appeal of the traditional dresses was an unexpected bonus.

TIP: The Spanish word for sale is rabajas.

We enjoyed our impulse purchases of Valencian fast food. The cool March weather made the hot chocolate taste good, the fresh-squeezed orange juice helped us to feel healthy, we enjoyed pork products in various guises, and the street-side Fallas paella and peanuts was a seasonal bonus.

Valencia is known for its thick hot chocolate. We sampled a cup at a table in a small café, accompanied by sweet, fried dough balls called bunuelo. The hot chocolate was indeed very rich, almost porridge-like in consistency, and competed with the doughy bunuelos for sugary richness. I do not think I could have drunk more than one cup, but we enjoyed the lazy and relaxed atmosphere of the café

We had seen the doughy confections being sold from small temporary stands on the street. For some intriguing reason, the stands advertise themselves with a couple of melons on the counter. We could not establish what this symbolises, and it surely does not suggest that their wares are particularly healthy.

Orange trees really are a prominent feature of the Valencia urban landscape. In early March there was still ripe fruit on the trees, although the one we sampled definitely looked much better than it tasted. However, many of Valencia’s cafés have orange juicing machines, and the juice from these was delicious.

It was fun to see the Fallas paella being cooked on the street. Not all paella is fish-based, and the ones we saw consisted mainly of chicken and beans with the rice.

The other seasonal fast food we came across included mona de pascua. These are thick, doughy nests wrapped around eggs (either hen’s eggs or chocolate eggs). They are apparently unique to Valencia and are sold for the Santa Semana holy week leading up to Easter.

Our last fast-food act in Valencia was to pick up some bocadillos (filled baguettes) for the RyanAir flight home. My bocadillo was filled with thick, salty bacon and certainly much better (and a much better value) than anything I could have bought at the airport or on the plane. It was a good ending to an interesting few days of fast-food experiences.