Valencia, just perfect for a his ’n’ hers hol...
WE WERE the first married couple on TV together, presenting programmes such as Watchdog, and we have always taken holidays together. But over the years our tastes on where to go have changed dramatically.
My husband [John Stapleton] loves lying on beaches ‘caramelising’ in the sun. After 17 years of early rising for breakfast TV, he thinks he deserves it. I hate it. My Scottish skin has already had one skin cancer. I like brushing up my languages, roaming food markets and looking endlessly at old buildings.
Now we’ve found the perfect way to stay married yet have separate holidays – city breaks with beaches.
We’ve just been for a long weekend to Valencia and had a fabulous semi-separate time. Who knew that Spain’s third-biggest city was so wonderful? While John sunbathed on Las Arenas beach – a tenminute £1.10 bus ride from the city centre – I explored the most astonishing city.
A terrible tragedy in 1957 turned Valencia into the fabulous parkland city it is today. The River Turia, running north to south through the city, flooded to a depth of 7ft, claiming more than 80 lives.
The river was diverted south of the city and the council planned a motorway in its place. But the people of Valencia had other ideas, and won. The vast riverbed was turned into five miles of wonderful parks, cycle tracks, music venues, adventure playgrounds (with a giant fibreglass Gulliver at the north end), football pitches, climbing walls, cafes, a zen garden, futuristic sci- ence park, zoo and the brilliant sealife centre – Oceanografic.
There are great restaurants on the beach for lunch. I’d hop on a bus to join John at Cabana for the tenderest octopus (warning – you get what seems like a whole cooked tentacle) and the sweetest orange juice. Valencia is home to the world’s finest oranges (they say), and the locals also invented paella and every restaurant serves it. The beach board- walk is a great place to watch Spanish hen and stag parties go by – all apparently sober, dressed in weird and wonderful costumes, out to eat lovely food and get the bride or groom high on no more than a water jetpack or parasail.
We loved the Valencia tour buses (£12.50 for one day, £14 for two) which have their main stop in Plaza Reina. They are worth every penny.
We ate pinchos (bread tapas with a huge variety of toppings) at places all over town, with Sagardi off Plaza Reina the busiest.
John didn’t make it but I’d recommend La Lonja, the medieval business centre of the city where the merchants used to sit on benches (bancos). If they did a bad deal, one leg of their bench was broken off – banco roto – and the word ‘bankrupt’ was born.
Valencia has a ‘nightmare debt problem’, the locals told us – ‘not even our grandchildren will pay it off’. So we were glad we had gone to help them out.
Ideas, please, on where we should go next on our semi-separate trip...
EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies from Gatwick to Valencia with one-way fares starting from £26.24pp. For more on Valencia, go to visitvalencia.com.