Starting to Fall in Love...

Slowly, slowly, Valencia started growing on us.

We started enjoying the different neighbourhoods, the beach, the streets, the little corners we recognised from before. Places stopped feeling completely unfamiliar. We started knowing where we were going, which areas we liked, which ones we didn’t, where we wanted to return and where we probably wouldn’t.

It still doesn’t feel like smooth sailing.

It isn’t a city where everyone is smiling and thrilled that you have arrived, welcoming you with open arms. Definitely not.

There are people who would rather see foreigners leave than arrive. There are people who believe we have pushed rental prices up, squeezed locals out of their neighbourhoods and changed the character of places they have lived in for years.

And honestly, I understand where some of that anger comes from.

There are still areas where I don’t particularly enjoy spending time. There are still moments when Valencia feels rough, loud, complicated and slightly unfriendly.

But now we are becoming familiar with all of it.

With the people. The neighbourhoods. The rhythms. The good parts and the uncomfortable parts.

And once that started happening, I began noticing how much there actually is here.

There is beauty everywhere. There are endless things to discover. Every weekend seems to come with another list of events, exhibitions, markets, festivals, neighbourhood celebrations or places we haven’t seen yet.

Every week we meet someone new.

And that was one of the main reasons I wanted to move to a bigger city in the first place.

In Dénia, after a while, I felt like everything had become too familiar. You recognise the same faces. You vaguely know people, but often never really connect. People already have their lives, their friendships, their routines.

For me, it started to feel stagnant.

I wanted something fresher. More curious. More open. More mixed.

This is only my experience, of course. Everything in this blog is.

But I had started feeling that the faces, the attitudes and even the conversations around me had somehow grown old for me.

I wanted new energy.

One experience with my daughter made me realise this even more.

She was taking hip-hop classes in Dénia in a group made up almost entirely of Spanish kids. She was basically the only foreigner.

And I felt incredibly alienated there.

I think she did too.

I don’t believe anyone was intentionally excluding us. It was simply a small community where people already knew each other, spoke Spanish naturally among themselves and had their own established relationships.

But that experience stayed with me.

Because there is a romantic idea you often read online about moving to Spain: that you arrive, learn a little Spanish, smile at everyone and suddenly become part of the local community.

For us, it wasn’t quite like that.

If your Spanish isn’t fluent, if you haven’t lived somewhere for years and if you don’t understand all the little social codes yet, you are still very much the newcomer.

And then there was the other option: the expat bubble.

But that didn’t completely feel like ours either.

So somewhere between a long-established Spanish circle and an expat community that didn’t really feel like us, I realised something important:

maybe we didn’t need to squeeze ourselves into an existing circle.

Maybe we needed a city big enough to find our own people.

And Valencia, slowly, is starting to feel like that kind of place.

Exploring City of Arts and Sciences

Searching for amazing sunsets outskirts of Valencia

Enjoying city evenings

Exploring famous sites

Finding secret gems

searching for the best lunch

admiring strange signs on walls of Valencia

Valencia is the most bicycle friendly city and we love it

and more admiring strange drawings on the walls