Valencia's lost walls and the Carmen quarter: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The medieval walls and the Carmen quarter
Valencia had a Muslim wall from the 11th century and a larger medieval one built between 1356 and 1370. Most of both is gone, but the Carmen quarter still holds a wall tower, a square built over wall remains and a street whose line was set when the walls came down, beside the convent that named the quarter.
The stops
The Torres de Quart is one of the only two gates of Valencia's old city wall still standing, built between 1441 and 1493 as the western gate toward Castile. French troops fired cannonballs and musket shots at it on 28 June 1808, during the Battle of Valencia, and the holes were kept through later restorations as a memory of that day. The wall was torn down in 1865, but this gate survived because it served as a prison.
Photo: Sjaak Kempe from Groningen, The Netherlands — CC BY 2.0 Here the Muslim city of Valencia came to an end: remains of its wall were found under the square, and a glass-covered entrance leads down to an underground municipal exhibition room that shows them. The square stands on an artificial mound about 15 metres above sea level, raised in the 11th century to keep out floods, which the Catalan Wikipedia calls the highest point in Valencia. It is the way into the old Moorish quarter of the Carmen from the cathedral's quarter, to which it is joined by Calle de Cavallers.
Photo: Joanbanjo — Public domain This palace on Calle Baja was the family house of the Martínez de Raga, who came from Alpuente, and was rebuilt in the 19th century by the González de Quirós family, whose coat of arms sits over its two lintelled doors. The neoclassical facade, with balconies and Ionic pilasters, is attributed to the architect Salvador Monmeneu Escrig, and behind it the old garden has been kept. It was a school for much of the second half of the 20th century and is now a residence for older people.
Photo: Joanbanjo — CC BY-SA 3.0 This semicircular tower is a surviving piece of the Muslim wall that once ringed old Valencia, built during the reign of Abd al-Aziz ibn Amir, who ruled from 1021 to 1061. It is dated to the 11th century, made of solid masonry, and now stands surrounded by the courtyards of private homes. It is named for the two streets beside it, Calle del Ángel and Calle Beneito y Coll, and it is one of the few traces of the city's Islamic period.
Photo: V. Ripoll Hernández — CC BY-SA 4.0 This tower is all that remains of the church of San Bartolomé, built in 1239 as one of the first ten churches raised in Valencia after the conquest by James I of Aragon; the church was burned in 1936 and demolished in 1944, and the tower was saved thanks to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos. It leaned after a new church was built between 1666 and 1683, until the architect Juan Bautista Pérez Castiel straightened it. Excavations in 1927 and 1928 found a large round tower of the Roman wall near the church's door onto Plaza de Manises.
Photo: Enrique Íñiguez Rodríguez (Qoan) — CC BY-SA 3.0 Francisco Salvador de Pineda, Intendant General of the Kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia, had this neoclassical palace built between 1728 and 1733 on Plaza del Carmen. Its symmetrical brick facade is flanked by two small towers, and the damaged coat of arms over the door still shows the date 1732. Pineda was in charge of collecting taxes and used those funds to pay for it, which cost him his post and his place in Valencia.
Photo: Joanbanjo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Carmelites founded this convent in 1281, and it gave the whole quarter its name. After the friars were forced out in the 19th century it opened in 1839 as a museum for the art left homeless by the closing of the monasteries, and when the Academy of San Carlos moved in it became the seed of Valencia's Museum of Fine Arts. It is one of the few medieval convent complexes in the city still complete, with a Gothic and a Renaissance cloister, and today it is the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània.
Photo: 19Tarrestnom65 — CC BY-SA 4.0 At number 9 Carrer del Museu, the artist Alfonso Yuste Navarro noticed cats slipping through a hole into his lot and, with the neighbours' permission, built a little house front around it in 2003 from ceramics, marble and parts of a shopping trolley. An inscription remembers the four cats said to have stayed in the quarter in 1094, a nod to the legend that the knight El Cid banished the city's cats after taking Valencia. It is an animal shelter, and the facade also holds a small ornamental fountain.
Photo: Joanbanjo — CC BY-SA 3.0 The painter José Benlliure bought this house, built in 1880, when he came back from Rome in 1912, refurbished it, furnished it with things brought from Italy, and had a studio pavilion built at the back for himself and his son Peppino. The family donated the house and its collections to the city in 1957, and it opened as a museum in 1982, with a romantic Mediterranean garden behind it with tile panels and sculptures. The street, Calle Blanquerías, is named for the tanners who worked in the district between the 14th-century wall and the Carmen convent's orchard, and its line was only settled after the wall came down in 1865.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Torres de Serranos were built between 1392 and 1398 in Valencian Gothic style on the site of an older gateway, faced in limestone mainly from Alginet to look more distinguished. They and the Torres de Quart are the two gates left from the wall pulled down in 1865, and both survived because they were used as prisons, this one for knights and nobles after a main prison burned in 1586. During the Spanish Civil War works from the Prado Museum were stored here, and each year the Fallera Mayor opens the Fallas festival from a platform in front of them.
Photo: Felivet — Public domain
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