Valencia: land of rice and oranges

Orange County

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We’re back at the station the next morning, bare-legged as tourists from a Northern clime will be, in search of orange groves. We see rows and rows of them from the window of a Northbound train. The trees are neatly plotted and short, about a man’s height. It was my own romanticism that made them tall and meandering.

We stop at Burriana, where the orange is the town mascot, appearing on the facades and in the patterns of tiles on overhanging balconies. There is even a museum devoted to the fruit. Valencian naranjas de mesa are the premium eating oranges in the country, as opposed to the bitter Seville ones, which are used for making marmalade. We poach an orange that is still green and after a week of being ripened in electric light, it becomes the most delicious one we’ve ever eaten.  

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In the town square, there’s a rodeo experience for kids with a mechanical bull and real-life announcer in a cowboy hat. There is only one little customer, but the cowboy gives her the star treatment. Opposite, a mother and her daughters are selling wine and snacks. If I doubt the idea of wine at 11 in the morning, their smiles wear me down. Soon enough, I’m sipping a red ladrón de lunas (thief of moons).  

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I’m grateful for the sustenance on the long walk to the beach. We walk and walk, past empty plots and holiday homes abandoned for the season. We will see this again when we visit other small towns in the region. If there were people, they would look at us strangely. What are we doing here, bare-legged and out of time?  The beach also feels abandoned; having been converted into a track for dogwalkers and people on militant exercise regimes, who barely look around them. I wonder if beaches are ten a penny here. Rumour has it that Valencianos don’t consider their own seascapes as picturesque as Alicante’s to the South or the Balearic Islands’ to the East. If they go there for the beach, Valencia means something else to them. It’s something else to us too, living as we do in a watery, sea-ringed place. 

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Our restlessness carts us off to Castelló.  Our cart is a full bus with blue net curtains and we watch the sun set through its rain-spattered windows. I am so cold in my thin red dress and I barely store any memories of Castelló. Stately gardens, a dropped heroin needle, a drunken late lunch hour and a workaday bar called Glam, where, for the first time in Spain, they ask for our vaccine passports. On the train back to Valencia, I let my reading take me to places as cold as I feel: a New York ice rink; a Canadian landscape in an Alice Munro story, where the snow is 'so still so immense an enchantment […] like being inside a Russian novel.' When, after this, there’s still a margin of freezing journey left, I open up Instagram and see a post on the sand dunes of Arachón in France, a place called ville d'été. Summer would be so nice now. 

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The Rice Trail

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When our dinner recommendations fall through, I am secretly pleased. We’ve received too many of them for my liking, and I always prefer to discover places by chance. On the corner from one of these suggestions, we come across a place that is too expensive for us. I expect to walk away, but my boyfriend sacrifices his birthday present from his aunt. I am grateful and determined that we should enjoy ourselves as much as we can. Still, the sharing rules of the first day, apply. We both want to try the famous arroz meloso, a kind of rice in clear flavoured broth and must settle on the same one. I always feel that he draws the short straw, because he eats everything and I don’t. We agree that this dish will be fish, but that I will forgo the paella the next day so he can have meat.  Spoiler: the arroz meloso with clams was the more delightful dish. Even my carnivorous boyfriend said so. 

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The next day we make two pilgrimages, one of which will be paella. But first, the Valencia football stadium. There is not a game on, and the meaning of this building that looks like a massive carpark, is lost on me.  I take pictures of the bat mascots and try to catch some vicarious excitement. Mostly, I am buoyed by the paella mission. I think how funny it is that we’ve been warned against paella in Valencia. One couple made non-committal remarks about being ripped off, while another friend left an anxious voice message warning us that paella in town was inedible. He then proceeded to recommend a place called Tony’s, out in the suburb of Meliana.

When we arrive, it is essentially a ranch, complete with a giant woodfire paella stove in the garden, an allotment and a farm. Around us is evidence of both the vegetables and ducks that go into the paella. Inside the dining room, there are multiple pictures of Tony, a silver-bearded man in a cowboy hat. He’s been on Masterchef Italia, photographed with fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana and even inside a Manchester tour brochure. The real thing appears, frowning slightly because we have not reserved. Would we mind sitting outside? He calibrates the position of our table, so that it is under the vines and sheltered from the wind. The cats that circle our table remind me of the fish restaurants in Cyprus, and make me feel instantly at home.  

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Tony is a perfectionist; he sends the waiter back for green napkins. Green, coincidentally, is my boyfriend’s favourite colour and we read into this. There is an eight-course menu, a tussle with the waiter when I explain that I will not be eating the rabbit and duck paella. Could I not just pick the meat out? No, but I’m fine - quite full of the red pepper stew, the olives, the patatas bravas with their seafoam alioli. The waiter’s answer to this is a giant swordfish. I bet Tony put him up to it, my boyfriend says. 

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On our way out, we see a ginormous shire horse, ready to lead a group of children out on a carriage ride. This is all part of Tony’s rustic vision.  But our first sighting of the place was a lone white house on field of blue artichokes, a pot of snail shells at the door.