Visiting Valencia and Turia Gardens

Is there any other other city on earth with a 5-1/2-mile-long park running through it? Valencia, three hours south of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, may be unique in that regard. It's a bustling modern city of close to a million, surrounding a historic center dense with architectural monuments from the medieval to the modern.

Here, the Jardines del Turia (Turia Gardens), snakes through the city as a long line of plants and paths. The Turia was a river until it flooded once too often, taking 100 lives. In the late 1950s, city officials resisted the lure of a super-highway, deciding instead to divert the river's course and repurpose the dry riverbed as an unbroken string of parks, gardens, and playgrounds.

The Turia's varied landscaping conveys just a hint of classical Spanish gardens, with their fountains, arches, and symmetrical design. Created piecemeal over several decades, the Turia is generally more casual and less manicured than other Spanish parks, with lawns, palm trees, orange groves, and a rose garden, all linked by paths for cycling and strolling.

The Turia riverbed park forms a wide, deep trench where urban sounds are muffled and locals and tourists can rest peacefully.

Some parts of the park, which has developed in fits and starts, are more formally landscaped than others.

There was a big push to landscape in the 1980s, when the city hired Spanish Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill to design several sections, and thousands of trees were planted.

Endemic Mediterranean palms and cypresses are a unifying thread, and Valencia’s famous oranges appear in groves throughout the park.

The University of Valencia’s botanic garden, founded four centuries ago and most recently refurbished in 2000, forms a “wing” of Turia park at its northern end. The greenhouse, filled with rainforest plants, dates from 1861.

An iron lattice "shade house" at the botanic garden is a 1990s re-creation of a 19th-century structure that burned down.

A Mediterranean rockery containing some native plants on the verge of extinction was filled with blooming euphorbia.

The park is crisscrossed by more than a dozen bridges, from medieval to ultra-modern, like Valencia-born starchitect Santiago Calatrava’s "Comb" bridge.

Also adjacent to the Turia park is the lovely Jardines del Real, or Royal Gardens, on the one-time grounds of an aristocratic estate. Modern sculpture and fountains play off palms, cypresses, and boxwood and bay trees cut into topiaries.

The riverbed park ends at Calatrava’s fantastical City of Arts and Sciences, the futuristic museum complex that has been the pride of Valencia since its completion in 2005.