Zoo Quest
Valencia has the biggest and best indoor market in Spain, the Merkat Central. It is housed in a beautiful cast-iron building in the middle of the old town. There are hundreds of stalls selling meat, vegetables, fruit, and fish. And brains, and barnacles and other things I couldn’t recognize. It’s the best market I have ever visited for size, quality and variety of unusual foods that I didn’t recognise. I didn’t fancy the weird barnacles or brains very much.
After lunch on our terrace, we took the 95 bus to the Oceanographic, the biggest aquarium in Europe and part of the City of Arts and Sciences. It has zones for different marine environments and is quite awesome. There are several glass tunnels that allow you to walk through huge tanks so you have big sharks swimming overhead. The engineering needed to build them is quite astounding. There is an arctic section with Beluga Whales, Walruses and penguins in an enclosure that drops snow onto them!
The finale to the visit was the Dolphin Show in an outdoor theatre like you see in adverts for holidays in Florida. Six good-looking young trainers were paired up with six good-looking young Dolphins and performed tricks. It was fun and entertaining, and I will never eat a Dolphin steak again.
Joke! I never have eaten Dolphin steak.
Or have I?
On our final evening we couldn’t be arsed to go out, our terrace was so damn nice and we were tapas’d-out. I bought some really crappy burgers from the supermarket and fried them up. The sunset over the Valencia rooftops and we watched flocks of noisy parakeets fly overhead to their evening roosts.
I would really recommend a tour of Spanish cities by train or coach. If you do so, make sure you get accommodation close to the city center if you can. It’s fun being where the action is and close to buses and metro stations. Spain has a huge amount of culture to enjoy, as well as beautiful beaches. As long as you can order “dos vino blanco per favor”, you will be fine.
timharnesstravels 
One thought on “Spain Tour 2018 – Day 12”