We are heading out from Valencia today. Most likely on to Ibiza and Palma. Will spend a week or so there before moving on to Barcelona where Suzanne Rischman and Denise Quackenbush are joining us for a week!
Valencia was a good pit stop for us. We had a couple of boat issue to resolve and enjoyed access to a solid internet connection to get some “life issues” organized.
I’m not sure that I’d return to Valencia. That may be unfair since this is mid August and the entire country seems to be on vacation. Even so, the city seemed absolutely deserted.
Its no surprise that the area around the marina seemed a bit empty. All of the previous America’s Cup infrastructure is basically sitting empty. I know that some of the AC teams return occasionally to make use of their compounds but many are just sitting absolutely empty. They are huge and if business was good, they’d be snapped up in a second for office space, etc.
The marina is a long $10 euro cab ride to Valencia’s “downtown” or “old town” areas, and then once you arrive at least 50% of the businesses are closed. Of the other 50%, it seems that most are running huge sales or promotions and many of those are “going out of business” sales.
Then as you walk around town, you notice that most of the multi story buildings have businesses on the lower floor and 2-3 levels of apartments/condo’s/homes on the floors above. It seemed to us that close to 90% of those had no lights on a night at all.
Vacation time or not, the third largest city in Spain is not as healthy as it should be.
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