Spain Diaries: Agua, por favor

Hydration in all its forms in hot and humid Valencia

In Valencia it’s a warm welcome but a frosty reception. The heat hits like a blanket the moment we step off the plane, not just hot but the sort of humidity that is all-encompassing, like opening the oven door. It’s a short walk to the terminal building but one that feels like a long hot bath.

The immigration officials though are there to cool a traveller down. My official is of the particularly suspicious variety. He’d rather no one enter Valencia. He looks at my passport, looks at me, looks at my passport, looks at me, passport, me, passport, me. If only I could keep a straight face. Stay calm, that’s what they tell you in these sorts of situations. Look them in the eye, don’t laugh, and whatever you do, don’t give them any reason to remember it’s been a while since they last donned a pair of gloves.

So of course the more the official looks at me the more I smirk. He asks me to take my hat off. At length I put it back on. No, he’s not finished, hat off again. Eventually, just when I’m resigning myself to being taken to a back room and given a particularly thorough searching, when the sweat from my thirty second walk in the sun that had just about been wiped away had been replaced by a different, more viscerally nervous kind of sweat, I’m waved on. He stamps my passport and flicks his head. He’s not happy about it, but he’s letting me into Spain.

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All that heat means one needs some hydration, and Valencia has just the drink. Agua de Valencia doesn’t have as much water in it as its name suggests, in fact it doesn’t have any water at all. It does have much more alcohol than is generally deemed necessary in a cocktail, even by the most hardened boozer.

To make your own Agua de Valencia at home you will need: cava (the Spanish champagne), gin and vodka. To this lethal combination you must add a little bit of sugar and jugs full of fresh orange juice, preferably from Valencian oranges. It’s a trap, this drink. It may contain enough alcohol to put a horse to sleep but it tastes like something you’d have in the morning with a croissant.

I drink some with dinner, practically guzzle it, really, and then because it feels like I haven’t had a drop, we move over to Café de las Horas. It’s a popular spot for some Agua, and over comes another full jug because why not? There’s no point ordering Agua by the glass, it’s too moreish. Ten minutes will pass and you’ll have had eight glasses, or you would have done had you actually been able to order one glass within ten minutes.

I hope it’s clear by now that here at Not That You Asked we try not to deal too heavily in what some may call vicious national stereotyping. Each nation of people is diverse in both people and culture and shouldn’t be reduced to crude generalisation. With that being said may I gently suggest that the inhabitants of the nation of Spain, or at least the residents of the city of Valencia, or at the very least, the wait staff of the Café de las Horas, could, and I say this with great love, hurry the fuck up.

The Spanish concept of mañana is well documented, the idea that something can wait until the morning, until tomorrow, until some unspecified point in the future. But we sit and wait for so long for our Agua in this gorgeous, gaudy bar, with its starry sky ceiling and red walls full of wine bottles and golden mirrors, that it nearly is mañana before we get our hands on that sweet, sweet Agua nectar and finally stumble out into the night.

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It’s important to keep hydrated like this, because it doesn’t rain in Valencia. It only averages 18.7 inches of rain a year. London by contrast averages 24, Glasgow 49. Even Barcelona, a few hours up the coast on the train, averages 22.5. Carlos, our tour guide, tells us it only rains on about 35 days a year. So, it doesn’t rain in Valencia.

While we take a walking tour, it rains. About half an hour after Carlos has told us this wonderful, sunny fact about his home city, rain drops as big as apples begin falling from the sky. Just one or two at first, and then all of them all at once. The humidity that has been plaguing us since our arrival, that has been making me feel like if you picked me up and wrung me out you could provide drinking water for a slightly boring mid-sized town, has finally broken.

This at least is nice but the water falls in sheets and Carlos takes the tour to shelter under the Torres de Serranos, one of the two remaining old city gates. He gamely tries to continue the tour but eventually gives in when a woman with a pram barges straight through the middle of the group. “Oh, this is impossible,” he sighs, and gives up. He makes for the café across the square and we stand and watch from under the gate. It would be romantic, watching a Spaniard walk away in the rain, if I wasn’t so damp.

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This all-or-nothing approach to rain in Valencia can cause problems. It has caused problems, problems of the rather big, city-altering variety, in the past. There was an enormous flood of the Turia river in 1957, which used to flow right through the city centre but now quite conspicuously doesn’t. It was such a bad flood - 81 people died and the river released 300,000,000 cubic metres of water, an unimaginable amount of water, one that I can’t really think of any way of describing except to say that it’s a lot of water - that the city authorities took drastic action.

I love what they decided to do because they did what an eight-year-old would suggest doing should they be confronted with this problem. They had a river running right through the middle of their city that kept flooding. What if there wasn’t a river? Well, then there’d be far less flooding. They diverted the Turia south of the city and now when you talk about the Turia when you’re in Valencia city centre you are probably talking about the Turia Gardens.

The riverbed has been turned into a miles-long public park with running tracks, walking paths, playgrounds and ponds. It stretches from the Cabecera Park in the west and the futuristic City of Arts and Sciences in the east, and I spend a lot of time walking along it. It provokes a feeling of being in the city but at the same time removed. It’s out and up there somewhere, the city, but my immediate problems aren’t roads and cars and hustle and bustle, instead they are the cyclists who threaten to run me over very slowly - no one is going anywhere fast in this weather - the dogs who pant in the heat, and the humidity.

It’s been a while since my last Agua and the sheets of rain haven’t arrived as I walk through the Gardens on a hot afternoon, and however slowly I walk I drip with every step. But considering my immigration incident I’m pleased to be here. If I have to lose half of my bodyweight in sweat anywhere, I think I’d pick Valencia. You can replace that sweat with cava, vodka and gin. And a splash of orange juice too, I suppose.

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Some housekeeping.

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