Valencian Community

Three provinces, one very long beach

Castellón in the north keeps its orange groves close and its tourism modest, offering castle-topped hilltowns and the wild Serra d'Espadà natural park for those who enjoy their landscapes without a crowd. Valencia, the regional capital and Spain's third largest city, is the cosmopolitan heart: home to the City of Arts and Sciences, a jaw-dropping complex of opera house, science museum and oceanographic park that emerges from a drained river bed like something that fell from a neighbouring century. Down in the south, Alicante province delivers the Costa Blanca's famous chalk-white limestone coast, the extraordinary palm grove of Elche (a UNESCO World Heritage site), and Benidorm, a city that has cheerfully out-glittered Las Vegas since roughly 1960.

A language with two names and one remarkable literature

Valencians speak Valencian, a Romance language with deep roots in the medieval Crown of Aragon that locals have called their own since at least the 15th century, when the city of Valencia was producing some of the most celebrated poetry and prose in Europe. Spanish is also official and universally understood, but visitors who attempt even a word of Valencian will find that it opens doors with remarkable efficiency. The region was the first autonomous community in Spain to write sign language rights into its Statute of Autonomy, and both Valencian Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language have communities of users across the territory. The street names, festival programmes and restaurant menus tend to arrive in both languages simultaneously, which visitors quickly learn to find charming rather than confusing.

What to eat, where to swim, when to arrive

A bowl of proper Valencian paella cooked over orange-wood flames in the huerta, the fertile irrigated plain just outside the city, is one of the more persuasive arguments for visiting the Mediterranean. Beyond rice, the region offers horchata (a cool, milky drink pressed from tiger nuts), roasted vegetables known as espencat, and turron, the dense almond nougat that Jijona has been producing since the 16th century. The coastline runs for roughly 520 kilometres and ranges from the wide sandy crescents of Gandia and Cullera to the rocky limestone coves of Javea and Moraira. The climate is warm enough to swim comfortably from May to November, which goes some way toward explaining why more than 30 million visitors pass through the region every year.