My Journey To Valencia: A Personal Essay

Daniel Hazelhoff was born in Puerto Rico to a Dutch father and a Puerto Rican mother. His journey to Valencia started when, as a young boy, the family moved to Sarasota, Florida. That’s where his younger brother Alexander was born. When he was six, his family decided to uproot and start their journey to Valencia. The times have indeed changed, he writes in a personal essay…

My journey to Valencia has been 21 years in the making. It started when I first moved to Spain, at the age of six. I vividly recall the dense cigarette and cheroot smoke billowing throughout the bars while matadors fought bulls on the precariously hanging television screens. In Rafelbunyol, near Pujol, our first Spanish home, the old men played cards grumbling at each other in Valenciano, laughing over their cazallas and cremaets. 

Cazalla is an aniseed liqueur. For those who don’t know what a cremaet is, it is a typical Valencian coffee and consists of two coffee beans toasted over burnt liquor, cinnamon, sugar, a piece of lemon peel, all served in a corto, an espresso shot.

I remember my first bous al carrer. The town, to my surprise, had been blocked off with blue wooden barriers, which seemed monumental at the time. I knew a bull would be let loose in the town, and that people would be running from it. There was no fear. My father plopped me on his shoulders, and walked around town. The anticipation was palpable. This would be my first physical experience with a bull up close and personal. Before, I’d only seen them on the flickering TV screens at the bars. 

At first glance, the heaving beast ignited fear in my young heart, but the young men and women dancing around the bull seemed completely in control of the situation. At the time, I wasn’t aware that they were mostly sauced. How could one not be? That same day I witnessed a young man get lightly impaled by the bull. My father quickly covered my eyes, but I still hold that image in my mind. 

Even though I witnessed that gruesome scene briefly, it didn’t affect my hunger. Soon, I was trying caracoles for the first time in my life. At the end of the meal, my plate was a mountain of empty shells. Thus began a lifelong love affair with this most Spanish of dishes. 

Friday night was family night

Fridays were sacred in my family. We would head into the city centre from home, now in Rocafort, to have dinner with family friends at La Plazita. That’s what they called it anyway. A Spanish upbringing was a far cry from what I was used to in the States. As children, we were free to roam around and get lost around the neighbourhood while the adults ate and drank and laughed.

We used to play football around La Plazita, and made friends with the locals. Our ball would roll into the street, and elderly couples would return the ball to us, pinch my cheeks and call me rubiales – blonde children weren’t very common, and I was something of a novelty.

As I grew older, the safety of childhood seemed to wane, as I’d hang out in Ruzafa and El Carmen. These neighbourhoods weren’t always what they are now, middle-class or hipster enclaves. El Carmen was more of a druggy neighbourhood, not the well-preserved tourist attraction that it is today. Dilapidated buildings and clouds of dope smoke prevailed in Ruzafa. Although the dope smoke remains, the ambience has changed almost beyond recognition. The gentrification of these neighbourhoods adds to what now are large parts of the vibrant heart of Valencia beloved by tourists and incomers. 

The winding alleyways of El Carmen used to be a sort of dare in my younger years. We’d see how far into the barrio we could get without getting scared. I now live there, in the heart of it all, and gleefully stroll through the narrow streets of the Casco Antiguo, finding new places to eat, and drink.

Evening jazz concerts in the river bring me back to simpler times, when a family friend and bass player would invite us to listen to the free-flowing music, picnic blankets spread out upon the green. Wine, beer and tapas fuelled our weekends.

Jazz had always been a part of my youth. Jazz seems to have stayed within the city, through music and style. Live music in the streets of Valencia has never ceased, and it’s hard to see a future where it would. 

Getting our skates on

A large part of my early years was spent skateboarding. We used to run from la policía local as they chased us for our boards that, if caught, would get confiscated. On top of that we would receive a €50 fine. Now, skateboarding has been brought into the mainstream, new skateparks have been created and Valencia recently hosted the Valencia European Skate Open, a subsidised event for skateboarders and practitioners of other street sports.

Longboarders take to the streets in their efficient form of green transport. New bike paths have been paved all along the Valencian streets, stretching to the beaches and outlying towns. We are more connected than ever.  

The America’s Cup came, and with it, the further development of La Marina. After the Cup, there was a profound period of abandonment, which in recent years has been replaced by vibrant nightlife and gourmand eateries. El Cabanyal, though, still stands unaffected, and somewhat forgotten, by the powers that be. 

Even though largely ignored, El Cabnyal has had new life breathed into it by locals and newcomers. Traditional tapas bars stand where they always have, and serve Valencian delicacies brought fresh from the markets. 

My journey to Valencia has come full circle 

The times have changed and I guess that’s just the way it is, for better or worse. The days of bullfighting on the television are mostly gone, the blue smoke in the bars has certainly disappeared. But children still roam freely, and young adults still dance around the bulls in Valencia in the bous al carrer. 

Nostalgia, almost by definition, means looking back at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, as LP Hartley famously, memorably wrote in the first line of The Go-Between.

But there is a bewitching enchantment to the half-remembered, flickering kaleidoscope of images from childhood that swim up from the subconscious, the section I call “my journey to Valencia”. Do I miss those days of street crime and pre-sanitised Valencia? I suppose I do, it seemed somehow freer and edgier.

Am I happy that Valencia has changed, and continues to change? Indubitably. We now live in a world-class, beautified city.

And yet… as F Scott Fitzgerald concludes in The Great Gatsby, mournfully, wistfully but undeniably true: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 

If life is but a dream, it is in the cauldron of our subconscious, and the past, that our dreams are fomented, stirred and finally given wing…