I’VE just returned from a break to Spain – hence the recent blog hiatus.
We stayed in Valencia for a couple of nights before heading off further down the coast, and looking around a couple of things struck me about the transportation system and the cars I saw.
First, the metro is brilliant – clean, spacious and easy to use, you can fly into Valencia airport and jump on the metro to the centre of the city. There’s also now a linked metro/tramway service that goes out to the beach area. There are buses, too, but the inexpensive metro seemed to do us fine.
The second is the amount of bicycles you see. Valencia is compact and flat, and in a country where cyclists are venerated rather than driven off the road, Valencia has made easy to use cycle lanes everywhere.
Indeed, they have their own version of Boris Bikes: it’s called Valenbisi. These look well used either for business or for socialising in the evening. There are also several bike hire companies for tourists, too.
The third is how much Valenciennes seem to like their BMW SUVs. Perhaps because I haven’t seen many new BMW X3s in the UK, I was struck by how many I witnessed around the streets of Valencia. And if it wasn’t an X3, then it was the larger X5.
Out in the country the BMW X3s disappear to be replaced by something more practical and robust: invariably it’s a Nissan SUV. The Spanish have a long affinity with Nissan, and you will see plenty of Nissan Patrols and the like. Of course, it would be wrong of me to ignore totally the Spanish SEAT brand. There are, naturally, many around – and with the stylish Ibiza and Leon, good to see as well. But in Valencia, where it seemed well-healed, it was the number of BMW X3s that I noted which was particularly striking.
It wasn’t all cars, bikes and metros. You can walk around Valencia easily – we went through the Turia gardens, the old river bed converted into gardens, walkways and water features with the famous City of Arts and Sciences Museum at one end – and then struck left for the port (where they hold the F1 grand prix) and the beach. A good walk, certainly, but our reward that other specialism of Valencia: a delicious paella!
Editor’s Blog on Spanish city’s mixed mode transport
