Valencia

A row of white concrete buildings stands at the far end of the drained riverbed. The shallow water between them is there for the reflection and comes to your ankle, and in summer children wade in at the edge.

The market dates from 1928 and is built of nothing but iron, glass and tile. Fish, meat and vegetable stalls still hold most of the floor, so souvenir counters are pushed to the edges. Stalls fold in the afternoon, so a morning visit finds more left.

The silk exchange has columns that twist like rope all the way to the vault. A Latin line cut into the wall sets out the merchant's rule of honest dealing. A cell for traders who could not pay survives next door, so the exchange also sat as a court.

A chapel to one side holds an agate cup put forward as the chalice of the Last Supper. The bowl has been dated to antiquity, though the handles and foot were added in the Middle Ages. The bell tower is octagonal and takes some two hundred steps on foot.

A freshwater lagoon held off the sea by dunes. The paddies around it grow this city's rice. A wooden boat takes some forty minutes to work round, poled off the bottom rather than rowed. The water turns red at sunset, and the boats crowd that hour for it.

The bed left after the river was moved became a park running clean through the city. The old bridges were kept where they stood and now cross parkland instead of water.

The walls came down and only two gates were left; this one stands open on the city side, so from behind it reads as half a tower. It held noble prisoners in the nineteenth century, and their scratchings are still on the inner walls.

On the night of March 19 the Fallas figures burn, and a public vote saves one adult falla and one children's from the fire. The pardoned ones are gathered here, so the rooms run through fashion and political satire by date. The older ones are markedly smaller.

At noon on Thursdays irrigation-channel disputes are judged at the cathedral door. Eight men in leather chairs run it aloud in Valencian, ruling on the spot without record or lawyers. A run of more than a thousand years put it on the UNESCO list.

Inside the line of the old wall the lanes are cut for one cart and no more, and murals run along the ground where the wall itself was pulled down.

A zoo recreating African savanna and forest, out where the Turia gardens begin in the west. Water channels and rock, not bars, separate animals from people. In the Madagascar section, lemurs come right down beside the path.

The long city beach north of the port, reached from downtown by tram. Paella restaurants line the seafront walk, ready for lunch after a swim. Where the sand runs out, the writer Blasco Ibanez's house survives as a museum.

The west gate of the 15th-century walls, flanked by two half-round towers. Cannonball dents from the French siege of 1808 still pit the outer face. A steep stone stair goes up to a lookout where Ciutat Vella's rooftops sit at your feet.

A rococo mansion whose alabaster doorway is carved with two river gods and their streams. It holds the National Ceramics Museum, where an old Valencian kitchen was moved tile by tile and rebuilt. Gilded family carriages stand on the ground floor.

A modernista market of brick, tile and iron built in 1916 in the Eixample. It began as a food market and now houses cafes and horchata counters. A few flower and fruit stalls on the lower floor are what remains of its first life.

The old fishermen's quarter hard by the sea, its house fronts clad in bright tiles. Its gridded lanes keep parallel to the beach, with a local market and old bars. In Holy Week the neighbourhood brotherhoods lead processions down to the shore.