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Valencia is a shopper's paradise! It is so compact and so easy to get around on a shopping spree! The main shopping street is Calle Colón, with no less than three branches of El Corte Inglés, the Spanish Department store chain. (there are actually four more branches around the city, would you believe!) It's a lovely busy street with branches of all the well known fashion chains interspersed with designer boutiques and the odd café or bar perfectly placed to sit and recharge your batteries. Take any of the streets off Colón and you'll have even more choice. Walk down Calle Jorge Juan, past even more shops and take a look at the Art nouveau Masterpiece Mercado Colón, recently restored to perfection and a perfect place to take a coffee and do a little more shopping.
The chiquest street in town is Poeta Querol, lots of beautiful designer stores (just off it is a little street Calle de Virués full of more designer shops and has recently, curiously, branded itself the Golden Mile) and, at its centre, our favourite building in Valencia, the gothic Palace that is home to the National Ceramics Museum.
For funkier shopping explore the maze of streets in the Barrio del Carmen, great one-off boutiques jostle with junk and antiqe shops and collectors record shops and on every corner and little plaza a plethora of bars and restaurants. Here too you will find the gorgeous Mercado Central, one of Spain's largest covered markets, battling Barcelona for first place!
If Shopping centres are more your style, you are spoilt for choice, there are no less than eight to choose from around the city. Where are they? Click here.
Shop Reviews
Valencia possesses all the large, important shops of any other important city, but it also has a number of strikingly original shops that are well worth a visit. Here is a selection, the first two are from the mind of Mr Bob Yareham.
CHEZ RAMON
Valencia’s ‘Mercado Redondo’ (Round Market) is a popular place for souvenir-seeking tourists and Valencians with an inclination towards haberdashery. It used to have a song bird market on Sundays before bird flu.
Ramon Gimeno’s great grandmother used to export onions to Britain until trading restrictions bankrupted her business and she had to try her hand at something else. She decided to move from her native village of Albuixech and open a shop in Valencia. That was in 1853 and today her great grandson Ramon and three of his five children are still cornering a sizeable part of the Round Market (yes, I know that sounds terrible) with their shop, which is really a series of shops, as they have expanded over the years, selling an incredible array of furniture and artisan, hand-made ceramics and cast-iron works.
To walk through the shop is to be carried back to a different era when a key could also be a serious weapon and people needed weather vanes to know which way the wind blows.
On all sides there are telescopes, plant pots, mirrors, fountains, magazine racks, religious icons, milk churns, BBQs, letter boxes, chimneys, poker sets, brass bedsteads, clothes pegs, baskets and chimneys.
Nearly all of this is made by traditional Valencian companies although Ramon admitted that the best chimneys come from Belgium.
As we spoke, English and German tourists came and went, buying little and Ramon pointed out that tourists were not really his market; that it was the owners of local villas (mostly Spanish) who came to buy his wares, and that those who took his products abroad were mostly Spaniards living abroad who wanted to remember something typical from home.
For the ladies there was a whole shop window full of traditional iron irons and a basket full of those large keys that have become popular as a cure for snoring if placed under a husband’s pillow.
Ramon, semi-retired now, sits outside and lets his children get on with it, content to chatter with anyone who feels like it and to reflect on how times have changed since 1853, not always for the better.
PLAZA REDONDA SUNDAY MARKET
On Sundays the little shops that on weekdays sell lace and needlework-related products pull down their shutters and Valencia’s emblematic ‘Round Square’ (if you see what I mean) becomes a flea-market which, although it was once teaming with birdlife in cages, is now an interesting mix of old and new.
The round square (maybe I should call it a circus but that suggests traffic to me and this is a pedestrian area with a diameter of only 37 metres) was built in 1840 by Salvador Escrig and a fountain was installed in the middle 10 years later.
The ground floor is taken up by shops and bars whereas the other three floors are given over to 34 dwellings of a humble nature which will soon be reformed by the Town Hall, hopefully with as much class as was the case with the Colon Market, although if that occurs, I imagine the present residents won’t be able to afford to live there.
The only birds left on sale are in a single pet shop, the others having paid the price of the bird flu scare, although there still appears to be a market for empty cages which fill up the central part of the square (circle).
Other stalls include one selling old posters and photos, dealing with events such as the Fallas of 1947 or the flood of 1957.
There are also leather goods, pet accessories, Heavy Metal T-shirts and one lengthy stall selling cassettes and CDs through a time warp, where there appears to be nothing that is not pre-1960 Spanish; so if you like Rumba, Zarzuela and Flamenco sung by men in wide-brimmed haps and skin-tight trousers (which I do) you’ll feel at home.
The usual stalls run by immigrants selling African memorabilia, jewellery and cheap alarm clocks and watches also put in an appearance, and you can buy plenty of tacky fans, aprons and Spanish folkloric accessories such as toy bulls and flamenco dresses, but there is also room for the occasional eccentric no-hoper selling art books.
Although the birds all flu away (one hopes) there is a rather fetching little dog that people go out of their way to pet and spoil, lying peacefully among the empty bird cages. Maybe he just ate the whole lot and all that stuff about bird flu is a cover up!
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