Beyond the Beach: The Working Valencia You Can Reach by Bike
Ask someone what Valencia is famous for and you will hear the same three answers: paella, the beach, and the white curves of the City of Arts and Sciences. All true. But spend a season here and you notice something the guidebooks skip — this is a city that makes things. Spain's largest supermarket chain was founded in a village on the northern edge of town. The country's biggest car plant is twenty kilometres to the south. There are workshops in the port district turning out beer, porcelain and audio equipment that ships worldwide.
The best part: Valencia is famously flat, and the Turia riverbed park gives you nine kilometres of car-free green corridor straight through the middle of it. You can string the working city together into one relaxed day on a bike. Here is how we'd ride it.
North: the supermarket empire that started in a butcher's shop
Head north out of the centre towards l'Horta Nord, the belt of market-garden villages that feeds the city. In one of them, Tavernes Blanques, a couple named Francisco Roig Ballester and Trinidad Alfonso Mocholí opened a butcher's shop in 1977. That business became Mercadona — today the largest supermarket chain in Spain, run by their son Juan Roig. The company stayed in that same village for nearly fifty years; in March 2025 it moved its registered office a few kilometres up the road to a new corporate campus in Albalat dels Sorells, built to hold around 2,600 employees.
A few minutes away, in the same cluster of villages, is another Valencian name you have probably seen in your grandmother's display cabinet. Three brothers — Juan, José and Vicente Lladró — started firing porcelain in nearby Almàssera in 1953, moved to Tavernes Blanques in 1958, and in 1969 opened the complex they called the City of Porcelain. Those pale, elongated figurines that ended up in living rooms from Ohio to Osaka were made right here, by hand.
It is an easy, flat ride out along the orchards, and it reframes the whole city: the tourist Valencia and the working Valencia are about twenty minutes apart.
The Turia park: the city's spine
Ride back into town along the old riverbed. After the catastrophic flood of 1957, the Turia was diverted around the city, and instead of filling the empty channel with a motorway — the original plan — Valencia turned it into a park. It is now the artery every local uses: commuters, runners, families, and quite a lot of cyclists heading to work.
Follow it east and it delivers you to the City of Arts and Sciences, designed by Santiago Calatrava, who was born in Valencia. What most visitors photographing the Hemisfèric don't realise is that one of those buildings houses a campus of the Berklee College of Music — the Boston school's first campus outside the United States, opened in 2012. Every year, students from dozens of countries come to Valencia specifically to study music production and film scoring.
El Cabanyal and the port: workshops, ales and hand-built machines
Keep going and you reach the sea, and the neighbourhood of El Cabanyal — rows of low fishermen's houses with tiled façades, half of them restored, half still waiting. This is where the city's maker culture is densest, and where you should plan to stop for a drink.
Stone Castle has been brewing American-style ales near the port since 2006, when craft beer was still almost unknown in Spain — an industrial-looking brewery and bar with metal barrels and old motorcycles for decoration. The city's other craft landmark, Tyris, followed in 2009 as Valencia's first craft beer brand, founded by two friends who came back from a European road trip convinced the local beer was boring. It is now one of the largest craft breweries in the country, with its own taproom in the centre.
The same district hides quieter workshops. One of them builds TENSA, a hand-built valve DJ mixer — a two-channel analogue rotary mixer with a fully direct-coupled tube signal path and an external linear power supply, assembled in small batches in Valencia and sold to DJs who care more about a clean phono stage than about features. It is a good illustration of what this city quietly does: small teams, high-end products, no factory floor the size of a stadium.
South: the plant that changed the region
This last one is beyond comfortable bike range — about twenty kilometres south, in Almussafes — but it explains a lot about modern Valencia. Ford opened its plant there in 1976, and the first Fiesta came off the line on 18 October of that year. It grew into Ford's largest manufacturing complex outside the United States and turned the surrounding towns into an industrial belt of suppliers and engineering firms.
And the newer wave
Valencia's startup scene is young but concentrated. In 2013 Juan Roig — the Mercadona president — founded Lanzadera, a startup accelerator, later folded into a campus called Marina de Empresas alongside the EDEM business school and the Angels investment fund. One graduate of that ecosystem is Zeleros, a high-speed transport company that grew out of a team from the Polytechnic University of Valencia after they won awards in a SpaceX-organised Hyperloop competition.
Riding it yourself
The whole northern loop plus the Turia park and the port is a comfortable day at a tourist pace, and it is flat almost the entire way. Take water — from May onwards the middle of the day is genuinely hot — and plan the El Cabanyal stop for late afternoon, when the breweries open and the light on the tiled houses is at its best.
You will end the day with a different picture of the place. Valencia is a lovely city to be a tourist in. It is also a city where people get up and go to work in factories, breweries and workshops — and that second Valencia is far more interesting than the postcard one.
