The Other Valencia: A City That Makes Things, Not Just a Place to Sunbathe

There is a particular moment on our tours when someone asks, roughly, "so what do people here actually do?" It is a fair question. Valencia presents itself to visitors as a place of leisure — the beach at Malvarrosa, the Old Town, long lunches, the orange trees. Easy to conclude the whole city runs on tourism.

It doesn't. The Valencian Community is one of Spain's manufacturing regions, and the city itself has quietly produced some of the country's best-known companies. Here is the version of Valencia we like telling guests about, once the photos of the Hemisfèric are safely taken.

The supermarket that runs Spain's shopping baskets

If you buy anything in a Spanish supermarket, there is a good chance it comes from a company that started twenty minutes north of where you are standing. Mercadona began in 1977 as a butcher's shop in Tavernes Blanques, a village on the city's northern edge, founded by Francisco Roig Ballester and Trinidad Alfonso Mocholí. Under their son Juan Roig it became the largest supermarket chain in Spain. It stayed headquartered in that same village until March 2025, when it moved its registered office to a new campus in neighbouring Albalat dels Sorells — a 200-million-euro building designed for roughly 2,600 staff.

The Roig name comes up again in a different context. In 2013 Juan Roig founded Lanzadera, a startup accelerator, which now sits on a waterfront campus called Marina de Empresas together with the EDEM business school and the Angels investment fund. It is the reason young founders from across Spain move here rather than to Madrid or Barcelona. One company from that orbit, Zeleros, grew out of a Polytechnic University of Valencia student team that won recognition in a Hyperloop competition organised by SpaceX, and now works on high-speed transport technology.

Cars, in serious quantities

Twenty kilometres south of the city, in Almussafes, Ford opened an assembly plant in 1976 — the first Fiesta rolled off the line on 18 October that year. It became Ford's largest manufacturing complex outside the United States, and it pulled an entire ecosystem of component suppliers and engineering companies into the towns around it. When people in Valencia talk about "la Ford", they mean an employer that shaped the region for two generations.

Porcelain, and the figurines in your grandmother's cabinet

Three brothers — Juan, José and Vicente Lladró — started making porcelain in Almàssera in 1953, moved to Tavernes Blanques in 1958, and in 1969 opened a production complex they named the City of Porcelain. Their pale, elongated figurines became one of Spain's most recognisable exports. It is still hand-work: sculpting, casting and painting done by people, not machines.

Beer, made here since before it was fashionable

Valencia's craft beer scene is older than most visitors assume. Stone Castle, near the port in the El Cabanyal area, has been brewing American-style ales since 2006 — at a time when craft brewing barely existed in Spain — under brewmaster Mauricio Mata Muñoz. Three years later, in 2009, two friends came back from a trip around Europe convinced that the beer at home was dull and founded Tyris, the city's first craft beer brand. Tyris has since become one of the largest craft breweries in the country and runs its own taproom in the centre.

Both are within easy reach of a tour route, and both are considerably more interesting than a chain bar on the beachfront.

Music, and machines built for it

Here is the fact that surprises guests most. Inside the City of Arts and Sciences — the complex designed by the Valencia-born architect Santiago Calatrava that everyone photographs — sits a campus of the Berklee College of Music. Opened in 2012, it was the Boston institution's first campus outside the United States, and it draws students from around seventy countries to study music production, scoring and performance in a purpose-built facility.

Around that gravity well, a small audio industry has grown. One example: TENSA, a boutique valve DJ mixer, assembled by hand here in Valencia. It uses vacuum tubes — not for the warm, coloured sound tubes are usually associated with, but for the opposite reason: a fully direct-coupled valve signal path and an external linear power supply, chosen for transparency and low distortion. Each unit is built in small batches, with hardwood side panels, for DJs who play vinyl and care about what happens between the cartridge and the speakers. It is a good example of the scale this city works at — not mass production, but small teams making things to a standard that competes internationally.

Why this matters for a visit

You can spend three days in Valencia and see only the leisure version of it: the beach, the Old Town, the park, a paella by the sea. Nothing wrong with that. But the city becomes considerably more interesting when you know that the supermarket chain feeding Spain started in a village up the road, that the car plant to the south shaped the whole region, that the brewery you are drinking in predates the Spanish craft beer boom, and that somewhere in a workshop nearby, someone is soldering a valve mixer that will end up in a booth in Berlin or Tokyo.

Ask your guide. Most of us live here year-round, and this is the Valencia we actually know.