Madrid Community Culture & Language

Valencian culture is loud, visual and closely tied to its festivals.

Las Fallas

The region’s defining cultural production: several hundred monumental sculptures built over a year by neighbourhood commissions, each a satirical tableau on politics and current affairs, erected in the streets and burned on the same night. It is a genuine folk art with professional artists, workshops and a museum of pardoned figures, and it is UNESCO-listed.

Ceramics

Manises produced lustreware from the fourteenth century that was exported across Europe and imitated in Italy; Alcora made fine porcelain under an eighteenth-century ducal factory. Tilework covers domes, market halls and shopfronts throughout the region.

Falleras and their dress

The women’s festival costume — brocade silk, a lace apron, and hair coiled into three ornamented buns — is an eighteenth-century form kept alive at considerable expense; a full outfit costs more than a small car and is handed down.

Architecture

Civil Gothic at the Lonja, Valencian modernism in the markets and the north station, and Calatrava’s white ribbed concrete on the Turia.

Painting

Joaquin Sorolla painted the Valencian beaches in violent sunlight and made a career of it; Jose Benlliure and the Valencian school preceded him.

Silk

Valencia was one of Europe’s great silk cities from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, with thousands of looms working in the Velluters quarter and the Lonja built to trade the cloth. The Silk College survives with its guild archive, and the patterned silk of the traditional fallera dress — still made on the same designs — is a direct continuation of it.

Music

The region has an extraordinary density of amateur wind bands — hundreds of them, most towns having at least one — which is where a large share of Spain’s professional musicians learn.

Spanish is spoken by everyone and is what most visitors will use.

Valencian is co-official, a variety of Catalan, and is used in schools, regional government, media and signage. Usage is much higher in the smaller towns and inland than in the city centres or the coastal resorts.

English is widely spoken in tourism, and German and Dutch are common along the Costa Blanca, which has large resident northern European communities.

Useful Valencian: bon dia for good morning, gracies for thank you, si us plau for please, and adeu for goodbye. Using them is noticed and appreciated.

Useful Spanish: la cuenta, por favor, and una cerveza.