2011 September
Sep 27
The Central Market in Valencia
icon1 valenciablogger | icon2 Valencia | icon4 09 27th, 2011| icon31 Comment »

Due to the beauty of the building, the quality of its products and the atmosphere that  surrounds it, the Mercado Central in Valencia is an essential stop for travelers and and lovers of Mediterranean cuisine.

central <b>market</b> valencia
It was inaugurated in January 1928, and is located in the heart of the city, in the of the “market” neighborhood , and the first thing you notice is the splendor of its factory, richly decorated with modernist Noucentists architecture in a unique work culminated by its central dome, which rises 30 meters above the ground and floods the area with natural light.

A stone staircase leads to the main entrance, flanked on both sides by a handful of curious street-level stands where you can buy a paella pan any kind of  kitchen utensil, a bag of nuts or savor a tasty tapa

Once inside, you are surprised by the width of corridors, which allow a comfortable and spacious walking along the aisles. There is a semi religious feeling, which can be confusing, because the activity of the Central Market is nothing but a sort of pagan celebration so close to the Valencian people.

The uniqueness of the Central Market would not be such without the excellence of the products offered, and which are simply the best. We must specially mention the Valencian orchard, whose mere exposure defines the word exuberance. Some of the stands  are so specialized as to offer seven varieties of beans. squash, eggplants and roasted peppers. Plenty of merchandise that stuns the viewer the first time he sees it. Valencia is famous for its tomatoes, produced in such a massive  quantity and of such a high quality that I dare to say you can not find any better ones

The Fish area also holds a surprise: live eels. Eels are a kind of emblem of the land. They swim in water tanks where they are confined to the awaiting slaughter when the customer makes his choice, which will contribute to the elaboration of an all-eels i pebre cooked in a clay pot with garlic and paprika. One can understand that not every stranger stands such accepts such a eerie view, but I still have to meet  someone who is reluctant when offered to taste this delicacy.

As a counterpoint to the more traditional cuisine, where we must not forget stalls with salted dried tuna roe and ling, and as befits a city that keeps pace with the times, the market is scattered  with stands of delicatessen, Greek and Italian food, where you can buy, from olive oil of the highest quality to tarama, Italian pasta or any other food, whether smoked salt, spices, chocolates or cookies.

On a personal note, I recommend Doña Concha’s fruit stand lost in the background. Ask where it is. Only there you can find yellow grapefruit, seven varieties of apples or mangoes like you have never tasted before. The excellence and variety of merchandise is only surpassed by the friendliness of Doña Concha, always serving with diligence and kindness at her stand which seems to belong  from another era, when the market was open back in the late twenties

Estelastar Only-apartments AuthorEstelastar

A grand plan for cooking lovers , spend a morning at the Central Market, get back to your apartments in Valencia loaded with treasures to discover, and prepare a feast of authentic Mediterranean food.

Contact Me 

Marc Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: Marc
Contact Me

Sep 7

In the fourth scene of the first act of the play Emilia Galotti (1772), the German poet, playwright and essayist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, puts into the mouth of the play’s protagonist a question that would resonate more than one hundred years later, with unusual force, in the head Friedrich Nietzsche. The question was if Rafael would have really been, as he was then considered, the greatest geniuses of painting being unfortunately born without hands. Emilia Galotti was convinced that yes, fact that didn´t allow him to have a major impact on modern art.

zuniga archive

Nietzsche remembered the episode in a passage in the ninth section of Beyond Good and Evil devoted to the problem of those who wait, in which he turned out to wonder whether Rafael without hands, understood in its broadest expression, not considered as in the kingdom of genius minus the exception than the rule, because ” lucky breaks are needed, plus many untold things, for a superior man, in whom lays the solution of a problem, to come to act in time to come timely”. In this timely act later as regards explode or catch the random hairs.

We do not know if inside the Spanish photographer and filmmaker Guillermo Fernández López Zuñiga (1909-2005), biologist and father of the Spanish scientific films, remained dormant the solution of some fundamental problems, but we have just learned that a monumental photographic and documentary archive belonged to him on the Spanish Civil War, comparable in quality, according to experts, to the one at the Ministry of Culture, current curated by Robert Capa, including letters, files, films and negatives of thousands of photos that have waited more than seventy years to be discovered in boxes covered with dust and cast aside, first secretly in the house of Zuñiga and later, after his death in the ASECIC, the Spanish Association of Film and Scientific Image that he founded in 1966. This is where fate intervened because his daughter Teresa, overwhelmed by the weight of so many memories, and not knowing what to do with such huge amount of material, she almost threw it all away before thinking of donating to the Association.

Its value is inestimable, as Zuñiga, close politically to PCE, was present with his trusty camera to the events mentioned throughout this period, since the proclamation of the Republic until the final days of the Civil War. Among the rare documents including legacy, being duly classified by the Center for the Study of Migrations and Exiles (CEME) from the UNED, while Teresa continues to find new boxes in her father´s home, is a splendid photo series of the legendary Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture Congress held in Valencia in the summer of 1937.

Paul Oilzum Only-apartments AuthorPaul Oilzum

The fascist spirit of the city has suffered since the enemies´ powerful onslaught, who seem to return to camp for ease in recent years, but if you rent apartments in Valencia you will see that hope for a better world still exists in some neighborhoods, as does the undeletable beauty one of the jewels of the Mediterranean.

Contact Me 

Hans Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: Hans
Contact Me