Cycle to the Sea
In Carrer Serrano, just around the corner from our apartment, we hired some bikes and then pedalled gently through the Turia park towards the City of Arts and Science. There are several old stone bridges that we passed beneath, which look very similar to the Roman bridge that we saw in Rimini.
The City of Arts and Science is the most popular destination in Valencia, for good reason. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava and Felix Candela and is a modern masterpiece of architecture and structural engineering. There are eight different structures, including a cable-stayed bridge and L’Umbracle, which is an open structure with a garden inside. It is like a very big conservatory where they forgot to put in the glass. L’Hemisfèric is an Imax cinema and planetarium and El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía is an Opera house.
The structures are all white and look like giant sculptures. Anyone of them on its own would be impressive, but there are seven different attention-grabbing constructions.
We went into the Science Museum but didn’t visit the exhibition. Reviews that we had read said it more for entertaining children rather than being a serious science museum.
We continue cycling until the park finished, and continued along cycle paths past the marina to the beach. A film crew was filming some very saucy sculptures by the marina, and I was asked on camera what I thought of them My response was a diplomatic “Interesting, but they wouldn’t erect them in London” Perhaps erect was a poor choice of words.
The beach is very big, many miles long and hundreds of metres wide. The weather was a little overcast, so good weather for Julie to read while I went for a swim in the Mediterranian. It was wavey and warm, but not as much fun as San Sebastian when I went swimming with my daughter Josie. Spending a long time on the beach is not our thing, so we went on to explore the marina.
At the marina, saw some Super Series 52 racing yachts which had just been racing out in the bay. Valencia is a good place for yacht racing because of it variable winds. Nearby in the marina is the HQ for the Americas Cup, which will next be competed for in 2021.
Also in the marina was Charles Simonyi’s private motor yacht Skat, which is 233 feet long and has a crew of sixteen. Man – has he got money! Mr. Simonyi headed-up the Microsoft Application Development Group, so when you are slaving over Word, Excel or Powerpoint, he’s the man to blame. Skat is grey, so looks like a naval vessel from a distance.
In another part of the marina, a wooden ship was moored. It was a replica of the Santa Maria, one of the ships that Christopher Columbus sailed to the Caribbean. The Caribbean was named after the Carib people that Columbus enslaved and ultimately wiped out.
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