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 |  | Travel Reviews : Valencia City |
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| | | | Review by visitor
The upper-crust retailers of Valencia who inhabit the chi-chi streets of Marqués de Dos Aguas, Poeta Querol and Salvá in the centre of the city, a Gucci glide from the wanna-be’s on Calle Colon, have come together to create Dos Aguas Luxury Shopping, a drool zone where Louis Vuitton, Monblanc, Loewe, Hermes, Cavalli, Lladró et fancy al flog their high-priced baubles to the uber-riche. They are producing maps and publicity in a joint venture to promote themselves and the area, although one wonders why surely the patricians of Valencia know they are there already? Still, appending ‘Luxury’ to anything can’t be bad for business, but unfortunately they are also calling the area the ‘Golden Mile’. Obviously they’ve never heard of Blackpool!
Glam these shops may be, but you’ll find them in almost every major city, and one of the joys of shopping in Valencia is that it is still home to plenty of one-offs where you can shop and smile at the unusual at the same time.
Whatever type of shopping you are doing, whether it involves food or not, it’s almost sacrilegious not to pay a visit to the Mercado Central. The biggest covered market in Europe, it’s worth a visit just to see the vast spread on offer (and to contemplate why, with all this deliciousness, you never get fresh veg served in a Spanish restaurant). In Moorish times Valencia was the most agriculturally productive region in the known world, and much of what you see now still comes from the surrounding huerta, the market gardens. There are stalls selling only beans for paella tarbulla, garrafo and rocher nearby you’ll find Cristianos doing battle with Moros – they’re snails, not representatives of Spain’s biggest fiesta, and in the fish section you’ll find prawns and ugly percebes laid out with as much care as a jeweller would lay out his gems. The Mercado is a Technicolor joy just to walk around, but if you fancy doing something with a full pig’s head you might have some explaining to do at customs.
If you want something veritably Valenciano, the place to go is La Labradora that sits at the top of, Calle del Music Peydró but you will have had to have won the lottery to afford one of their pure silk confections. At upwards of €1000 these aren’t things you drape over your shoulders to go to the market!
It’s worth a wander down the Calle, because there’s something there for everyone, no matter how penurious your purse. At first it just looks like a seedy back alley, but it’s one of my favourite streets in the city. Within a hundred metres you’ll pass a fancy cushion shop, a herbolista, Chinese emporium, a wonderful arty-crafty shop called Menfis, Anexo de Mas Masia - a temple to articulos plasticos and El Globo, ‘Fundada 1856’ which has a fair percentage of its cane stock spread out in the street. Keep going almost to the bottom and marvel at Barato de Garcia, a shop that still sells proper men’s vests, embroidered pinnies, big baggy knickers, and day-glo waistcoats to make sure you don’t get knocked over the next time you’re digging up the road outside your house.
One of the real delights of Valencia is the specialist food shop, where the extra cost of the personal service for a half bottle of wine or a few grams of jamon far outweighs the pile-‘em-high mentality found in supermarkets these days. When you see shops bearing the words ultramarinos (because the goods originally came from ‘over the seas’) and mantequerías, think ‘deli’, and you’ll find a wonderful array of food inside. But a new phenomenon has arrived that takes the selection one step further the deli with a café and/or restaurant attached. You can buy your hams, cheeses, fancy this or special that and take it home, take a copa and sliver of something at the bar, or sit down to a full meal, choosing from a menu of the shop’s specialities.
Jamones Juan Gargallo, at Almirante Cadarso, 30, is a splendid place start the day with a coffee and tostada, nip in for a tapas lunch or have dinner with friends. The display cases of the front section bulge with pic-nic basket delights of meats and cheeses, pickles and salsas, and you can try Gargallo’s excellent own cured jamones and squishy sobresada. The stark but elegant restaurant serves samplings direct from the wonderful displays and the salads are a gastronomes delight, going way beyond the tomato and chopped lettuce you are usually offered. It’s a curious sensation, drinking a glass of beer (poured, almost inevitably, from a jamon-shaped pump) while waiting for your ham to be cut and wrapped, but something everyone should try at least once.
A similar shop/café idea, but one of an infinitely more sweet-toothed variety, is Cacao Sampaka on Conde de Salvatierra, just beside the stunningly restored Mercado Colon (itself a wonderful place to take a coffee or aperitivo and watch the demi-monde pass by). A temple to all things chocolate, Sampaka exceeds any imagination you might have as regards the humble cocoa bean. (I bet you’d never think of combining curry and chocolate they do here and the result is disturbingly delicious.)
Cadburys, eat your heart out, because at Cacao Sampaka you can sample sixty-four different flavours, most of them arranged as eight ‘collections’, which you can buy as a collective whole or mix and match to tickle your taste buds. Bewilder your senses with Palma Ham or Modena Vinegar wines and spirits fruits and truffles or the enticingly entitled innovaciones gastronómicas, all wrapped around with richly delicious chocolate made from the best quality cocoa beans available. A gourmet range of chocolate is made from beans from a single plantation, and once the beans are exhausted the flavour ceases to exist, as the producers move on to buy another plantation elsewhere in the world. But these chocolates are ‘designed’ more than simply ‘produced’ and one of the three designers Sampaka use is Feran Adria, whose restaurant, El Buli, is considered Spain’s best.
If you just simply, simply can’t make up your mind which delicious morsel to sample, then why not try a degustación of either the liquid chocolates (and you really must try the jasmine flavour) or the tongue-teasing variety on offer in the shop, and you can do so in the café at the rear of the shop. But whatever you try, savour it s-l-o-w-l-y
On Calle Paz you might be tempted to nibble on pomelo, chocomint, te verde, or fresa (grapefruit, chocolate mint, green tea or strawberry), but I wouldn’t really advise it because you’d end up with a mouthful of bubbles. Bath-bombs and seductive soaps have been around in the UK for some time, but they are little known in Spain, and Enjabonarte has entered the soapy fray with a weirdly wonderful selection, most of which are made with top-quality olive oil and mixed with all kinds of funny things, which, quite frankly, can look rather peculiar. (The pomelo looks as though it is full of wiggly worms, but I’m assured the squiggles aren’t.) Use them though, and all thoughts of strangeness slip from your mind.
When you enter Enjabonarte, two large wall mirrors reflect the huge multicoloured slabs of soap into infinity – almost like Alice preparing for a muck-fest and not Wonderland. Probably a bit ‘coals to Newcastle’ as far as souvenirs go, but they could add just that romantic little touch to a deep soak in your hotel bath – especially if you add a few of Sampaka’s gorgeous chocolates and a bottle of chilled cava to the seductive equation.
No doubt the ‘Golden Mile’ will continue to glimmer as the elite continue to shop with the Platignum Card taken out of the €20,000 Hermes handbag, but there are plenty of diamonds to be found elsewhere in Valencia that can still give you that louche, well-shopped feeling without having to pawn the family jewellery.
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