Avoid Barcelona Crowds At This Underrated Spanish Foodie City With Spacious Beaches

While everyone should try to visit Barcelona at least once, Valencia is the kind of city where tourists immediately begin fantasizing about finding a little apartment and going digital nomad. It's just so graciously livable. The food is superb, especially the native paellas. Valencia also has one of the most innovative central parks of any major city on the planet, plus a civic arts and museum complex that's an architectural wonder. Throw in a thriving beach scene with clean, clear waters, and you have a city that just beckons to be discovered.

One thing you can't get in Barcelona? The best paella in Spain. That is in Valencia, where the dish was invented. Luckily, you can experience both paella and the playa on the same day. The central Playa de Las Arenas is bustling with activity and a great destination for water sports, but much like Barcelona's tourist-trappy Las Ramblas, it's not the best place to eat. Luckily, some of the best paella restaurants are along the beachfront at Malvarrosa, a 7-minute subway ride from downtown and the beach more frequented by locals.

Valencia is a favorite foodie hunting ground, with delightful surprises like the two-star Michelin-rated Richard Camarena Restaurant, set inside an art gallery, where you can linger over a 3-hour meal. But the town's signature dish of paella began as a peasant feast with roots in the 16th century. The best versions in the city are served at the restaurants lining the beachfront at Malvarrosa, so brush up on a few important Spanish phrases and get ready to go locavore. 

A traditional paella combines saffron rice, beans, chicken, rabbit, and escargot, cooked in a shallow iron pan over a wood fire, until the bottom caramelizes into a crispy crust, called soccarat. Then the pan is brought right to the table. At some beachfront restaurants, like the famed Casa Carmela, you dig right into that communal pan with a wooden spoon. After a meal like this, you'll understand the importance of the Spanish siesta and be glad to lounge away the rest of the day on the playa.

To get to the heart of the paella tradition, you have to travel a few kilometers to another beach town, the fishing village of El Palmar, where casual outdoor eateries serve the most authentic paella in the world. Try Restorante el Palmar, located inside the Albufera National Park, Valencia's answer to ecotourism, where you can dine under an umbrella, then take a boat ride for some birdwatching.

The city's most seductive attraction has to be its Turia Gardens. After Valencia's river overflowed in the 1950s, causing epic destruction, the city diverted its flow, leaving behind a bare riverbed. Instead of filling it in, the city had the genius idea of turning it into a park. Turia Gardens is a huge, 6-mile-long greensward today, crossed by 18 bridges that once spanned the river, with sections designed by different landscape architects. It's reminiscent of New York City's High Line Park, which repurposed a former elevated subway track, but this one lies low. Popular with joggers and cyclists, the park connects the old city with the new.

While Barcelona has early 20th Century architect Antonio Gaudi's architectural masterpieces to show off, Valencia has the modern-day equivalent in Valencian architect Sergio Calatrava's futuristic City of Arts and Sciences, a vast complex containing museums, a planetarium, an IMAX theater and opera house. The complex connects to Turia Gardens with a lake where you can rent a canoe or go futuristic and rent a water walking ball. So spacious and sprawling that it never feels crowded the way Barcelona does, it looks like a city from the set of a "Star Trek" movie — maybe Federation Headquarters on an Edenic future Earth. This Spanish masterpiece is already a pilgrimage for architecture buffs. You might just find yourself thinking, "Oh, that Gaudi, he's so last century!"