Roman Valentia became Spain's Fallas Mediterranean hub
València, capital of Spain's Valencian Community, sits on the Turia at the Mediterranean with about 824,340 residents. Romans founded Valentia Edetanorum in 138 BC. It thrived in the fifteenth century, made silk in the eighteenth, hosted the Republic's government in 1936–37, and runs one of Europe's busiest container ports.
The Latin name meant "valour." According to Livy, the colony was settled by Roman veterans who had fought the Lusitanian rebel Viriatus, and Rome habitually honoured such soldiers with land. After Rome fell, the town belonged to the Visigoths from 546 to 711 and surrendered to the Moors around 714. Under Islamic rule it went by a name read either as "City of Joy" or "City of Sands," gained new irrigation and crops, and later headed its own taifa kingdom. The poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol spent his last years there, and El Cid seized the city by force in 1094 and ruled it as his own principality.
James I of Aragon forced its surrender on 28 September 1238, after which some fifty thousand Moors had to leave. The Black Death of 1348 devastated the population, and in 1391 a mob destroyed the Jewish quarter, killing thousands and forcing survivors to convert. Genoese merchants then spread white mulberry cultivation and silk techniques. The 15th century became the Valencian Golden Age, leaving the Serranos Towers and the Silk Exchange, and by 1500 Valencia was the most populous city of the Hispanic Monarchy. It was also, grimly, the West's second slave-trading hub after Lisbon.
Decline set in as Atlantic routes eclipsed the Mediterranean and Barbary corsairs raided the coast; religious houses covered perhaps a third of the city. The 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos, around a third of the kingdom's people, ruined nobles and bankrupted the municipal bank by 1613, and the War of the Spanish Succession ended the kingdom's legal independence.
Today some 824,000 people live in the city itself and 2.5 million across the metropolitan region, making it Spain's third-largest city. UNESCO listed its Falles festival as intangible heritage in November 2016, and Valencia was named World Design Capital for 2022 and European Green Capital for 2024. Only the Valencian spelling València has been official since 2017.
Source: Valencia
