Valencia, After the Storm

Valencia greets you with light. It hits you first at the beach—sun on skin, salt in the air, grilled fish somewhere nearby. The fishermen’s houses line the streets in quiet rows, chipped blue tiles and laundry fluttering like memory. Low, weathered, proud. You can still feel the working-class heartbeat here, beneath the waves of gentrification. It’s soft, but steady.

So much history stored in those walls—worn thresholds, names etched in ceramic. These were homes for people who woke before dawn and came back after dark, hands rough with rope and salt. Now they’re photographed, admired, but still inhabited by ghosts who remember what it cost.

We passed the Fábrica de Hielo—the old ice factory, where people used to haul blocks to keep the fish cold. Now it’s a place for live music and cheap wine and revolution. A Free Palestine flag flutters above the entrance. The past hasn’t disappeared—it’s just been repurposed. The echoes are still there, layered between sound checks and conversations that stretch late into the night. You can feel the shift if you stand still long enough.

We got everywhere by walking the river. Or what used to be one. The Turia dried up after a devastating flood in the 1950s, and instead of rebuilding around it, they redirected the water and gave the riverbed back to the people. Now it’s a long, green park that cuts across the city like a scar that bloomed. Old stone bridges still arch overhead, casting shade across running paths and playgrounds. Nature reclaiming something, but gently this time. Not wild, not overgrown. Forgiving. That was how we moved—along the ghost of the river, letting it carry us forward.

We were told a story while we were there. A friend of ours spoke about a friend of hers—caught in the middle of storm Dana. She was driving when the floods came. Her car filled with water, fast. She managed to climb out through the open roof and spent nine hours stranded on top of it, sitting in the middle of the rising, churning dark. Two men floated past—she pulled them up. They waited there together, soaked, shivering, not knowing if they’d make it. She didn’t smoke, but they had three packets of cigarettes, so she started. Because what else do you do when the world is swallowing everything? You light a cigarette. You pass it around. You listen to the screams until they stop. And then it goes quiet, and that’s the worst part.

I carried that story with me, walking deeper into the city. Thinking about how easily everything we call normal slips away.

We arrived at the Cathedral. One of those postcard sights. Ornate. Impressive. Holy, in that manufactured way. But if you look up at the statues of kings, you’ll notice something missing. Their heads. Removed during an uprising—not because one king misbehaved, but because the people had enough of the whole lineage. It was a gesture, a refusal. We don’t forget things like that.

Even now, the spirit hasn’t dulled. When the current king showed up after Dana—after people had drowned in their homes and cars—he was met not with fanfare, but with mud. They threw it at him. Not because they didn’t know how to behave, but because they did. Valencia remembers.

I tried to keep up with it all. Tried to enjoy every corner, every street, every plate of food. But traveling in this body—this body with its broken fuse box, its rewired nerves, its strange, stuttering limits—is something else entirely. I wanted to go everywhere, see everything. Carlos did too. He had the energy for it. I didn’t. I kept pushing, anyway, until my legs turned to ash and my brain started flickering like a light about to burn out.

I felt it coming. The collapse. Like London, years ago. My body dragging me down into itself, like quicksand. It’s a particular kind of grief—to want to move, to explore, and to be pulled back by something you didn’t choose.

Still, I wouldn’t trade it. Not the stillness. Not the cigarette story. Not the tiles. Not the storm. Not the mud. Not the dry river that now blooms.

Valencia isn’t just beautiful. It’s full of things that refuse to be forgotten.

And I want to remember it all.

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If you enjoy stories like this, I share more travel snippets—quiet moments, strange encounters, scraps of beauty—on Polarsteps: polarsteps.com/leavesofgrasstrailsofdirt