Valencia

Opened in 2008 at the western end of the Turia park, Bioparc is a zoo built on the idea of immersion: instead of cages, animals live in recreated African landscapes of savannah, equatorial forest, wetland and the island of Madagascar, separated from visitors by hidden moats, rock walls and streams. Elephants, giraffes, gorillas, hippos and lemurs share habitats with other species much as they might in the wild, and the walking route is designed so that you seem to stumble on them rather than look into an enclosure. It is a half-day outing and especially good for families.

TipBuying tickets online in advance is usually cheaper than at the gate. The metro and several buses stop nearby, or cycle out along the Turia.

After the great flood of October 1957, Valencia diverted the Turia south of the city in a huge new channel, the Plan Sur, and the old riverbed was left empty. A plan to run a motorway along it was defeated by public campaigning in the 1970s, and the city turned it into a park instead. The result, the Jardí del Túria, runs for around nine kilometres beneath the old river bridges, some of them medieval, linking Bioparc in the west with the City of Arts and Sciences in the east. It holds orange groves, pine woods, sports pitches, running tracks, fountains and ponds, the concert hall of the Palau de la Música and the Gulliver playground, where children climb over a giant reclining figure of Swift's hero.

TipThe best way to see it is by bike: Valenbisi, the city's bike-share scheme, and many rental shops make it easy, and the path is flat from end to end.

The city's medieval walls were torn down in 1865, but two of their great gates survived. The Torres de Serranos, built at the end of the fourteenth century beside the river, are a magnificent piece of Valencian Gothic: two tall polygonal towers flanking an arch, open on the city side so that defenders could not hold them against the town. Climb the steep stairs to the battlements for a view over the riverbed and the rooftops of the old town. Each year the Fallas festival is formally opened from here at the end of February in a ceremony called the Crida. The other surviving gate, the Torres de Quart on the west side of the old town, still bears the pockmarks of cannon fire from the Napoleonic siege of 1808.

TipBoth towers have a small entry charge, and are among the municipal monuments with free entry on Sundays and public holidays; check current times on the city council website.

Built mostly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century on the site of the Roman temple and the later mosque, the cathedral is a patchwork of styles, with a Romanesque doorway, a Gothic body and an exuberant baroque main entrance. Its greatest treasure sits in a former chapter house to one side: a cup of polished agate which tradition identifies as the Holy Chalice used at the Last Supper. The stone cup itself has been dated to around the first century BC to the first century AD, while its gold handles and jewelled base are medieval. It reached Valencia in the fifteenth century from the court of the kings of Aragon, and popes have celebrated Mass with it on visits to the city. Behind the high altar, restored Renaissance frescoes of angel musicians were rediscovered above a later baroque vault in 2004.

The octagonal bell tower, the Micalet, rises beside the cathedral to just over fifty metres, and a narrow spiral staircase of around two hundred steps leads to the top, with the best view in the city: the domes and tiled roofs of the old town, the Turia Gardens and, on a clear day, the sea. Outside the Apostles' Door, every Thursday at noon, the Water Tribunal meets: a council of farmers from the irrigation channels of the surrounding huerta, which has settled disputes over water in public, in Valencian, for many centuries. It is listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage.

TipThe cathedral visit has an entry fee that includes an audio guide; the Micalet has its own ticket. Arrive a little before noon on a Thursday to see the Water Tribunal.

The Silk Exchange, built between 1482 and the early sixteenth century when Valencia was one of the richest trading cities of the Mediterranean, is the city's finest building and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. Its great Hall of Columns is a merchants' temple: spiral pillars twist up like palm trunks or twisted ropes and open into rib vaults high above, an extraordinary piece of late Gothic engineering. Elsewhere there is a garden courtyard of orange trees, a tower that once served as a debtors' prison, and the Consulate of the Sea upstairs, with a magnificent gilded and coffered ceiling. Look out for the gargoyles on the outside, a few of them surprisingly rude.

TipEntry is cheap and is free on Sundays and public holidays, when it is busier. It takes less than an hour, so combine it with the market across the road.

Directly opposite the Lonja, the Central Market opened in 1928 and is one of the largest fresh food markets in Europe, housed in a Valencian modernista hall of iron, glass and coloured tiles beneath a high dome topped with a parrot weathervane. Hundreds of stalls sell ham, cheese, salt cod, spices, snails, seafood and the produce of the huerta, the market gardens around the city, including the beans and rice you need for a proper paella. A few bars inside serve tapas and drinks to shoppers, and the building alone is worth the visit.

TipThe market opens in the morning and closes in the afternoon, and does not open on Sundays; go before midday for the full bustle. On the other side of the old town, the smaller Mercado de Colón is a beautifully restored modernista hall of cafés and restaurants that stays open into the evening.

A few minutes' walk south-east of the market, this aristocratic palace has the most theatrical doorway in Spain: an eighteenth-century rococo extravaganza in alabaster, in which two muscular figures representing the two rivers of the family's title pour water from urns amid a swirl of palm trees, animals and fruit. Inside is the National Ceramics Museum, a reminder that Valencia and nearby Manises were great centres of glazed pottery and tiles from the Middle Ages onwards. Alongside the collections of lustreware, azulejos and a reconstructed Valencian kitchen, the palace's own gilded rooms and carriages are on show.

South of the old town, past the North Station, whose ticket hall is a gem of early twentieth-century modernista tilework decorated with oranges and mosaics, the district of Ruzafa (Russafa in Valencian) has become the city's liveliest neighbourhood. A nineteenth-century grid of apartment blocks with iron balconies is now filled with independent shops, galleries, vintage clothing, cafés, wine bars and restaurants from every corner of the world, with its own colourful market at its heart. It is at its best in the evening, when the terraces fill up, and especially during Fallas, when its streets are strung with famous light displays.

At the eastern end of the Turia Gardens, the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències is a complex of white, curving buildings set among shallow pools, most of them designed by the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava and opened from 1998 onwards. The Hemisfèric, shaped like an eye with a lid that opens and closes, houses a planetarium and giant-screen cinema; the Museu de les Ciències, a vast skeleton of concrete ribs and glass, is a hands-on science museum; the Umbracle is a landscaped walkway of palms and sculptures; and the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía is the city's opera house, its shell crowned by a soaring steel feather. The Àgora, a covered space with a pointed roof, completes the set.

Across the water, the Oceanogràfic, whose undulating roofs were designed by the engineer Félix Candela, is the largest aquarium in Europe, with underwater tunnels, sharks, belugas, penguins and a large dolphinarium, the last of which has drawn criticism from animal-welfare groups. You can walk around the outside of the whole complex free of charge, and it is spectacular at night, when the buildings are lit up and reflected in the pools.

TipCombined tickets for the museum, the Hemisfèric and the Oceanogràfic save money if you plan to see more than one. Allow most of a day for all three.

Valencia's old fishing quarter, El Cabanyal, runs parallel to the sea in a grid of narrow streets lined with low houses covered in brightly coloured tiles. For years it was threatened by a plan to drive an avenue through it; that was abandoned, and the neighbourhood is now being restored, with a growing number of bars and restaurants alongside the old fishermen's taverns. Beyond it lie the city's beaches, a broad strip of fine sand several kilometres long: Las Arenas, El Cabanyal and, to the north, Malvarrosa, all backed by a wide promenade. The restaurants on the seafront are a traditional place for a weekend paella, and the beaches have showers, lifeguards in summer and plenty of space even in August.

TipTram lines from the centre reach the seafront in about twenty minutes. For quieter, wilder beaches, head south to El Saler and the dunes of the Devesa.

About ten kilometres south of the city, the Albufera is a large freshwater lagoon separated from the sea by a strip of dunes and pine woods, the heart of a natural park surrounded by rice paddies. This is where Valencia's rice, and with it paella, comes from, and the landscape changes with the seasons: flooded and mirror-like in winter, bright green in summer, golden before the autumn harvest. It is an important wetland for birds, including herons, egrets and flamingos. In the village of El Palmar, almost surrounded by water and canals, restaurants serve paella, arròs negre (rice blackened with squid ink) and the local speciality, all i pebre, eels in a garlic and paprika sauce, and local boatmen take visitors out on the lagoon in traditional flat-bottomed boats.

TipA late-afternoon boat trip followed by sunset over the water is the classic Albufera experience. City buses run from the centre to El Saler and El Palmar, but a car or an organised trip makes it easier to combine the two.