La Via Churra and other Valencian lessons

Hanging out with Valencia's Official Fulbright Liaison, Rubén is always a culturally informative one.  It is always a day filled with Spanish culture, history, vocabulary, and unfortunately... grammar.

Rubén urged me this weekend, to rent a bike from Do You Bike. It was a pretty good deal- 15 euros for 24 hours on a weekend, and a 50 euro refundable deposit. My only complaint is the seat.... next time i'll try to rent or buy or borrow a padded seat cover so that my culo doesn't go through that torture again.

So after lugging my new rental up and down my narrow piso stairs, applying my spf 30, and actually eating breakfast for once, I was ready for an excursion through la famosa Huerta through the norther fields of Valencia at 9am sharp!

Ruben showed me this AWESOME trail. It used to be a railway route from the city of Valencia, up north in order to transfer goods. Thanks to modern technology and trucks, this train route is no longer needed. As a result, the generalitat has removed the rails but paved over the same route to make a bicycle lane! Its called  La via churra or Xurra in Valenciá.  

We rode through lots of fields and saw country houses surrounded by pines and palms, with fields of Nisperos, watermelon, oranges, roses, lettuce, and of course: Chufa. This lead to an overview of how to make Horchata (which I will be attempting soon) and about the canals that flow through la Huerta that can be opened and closed and there are even weekly or monthly meetings to discuss the distribution!

 By the time we were only 1/3 through our adventure, we had a slight pause due to a non-typical Valencian summer rain.  We took cover for about 20 minutes until the rain passed while exchanging lessons in culture.

After the rain passed, we continued on La Xurra and saw an old Barraca, the original Valencian huerta style house with the thatched roof accompanied by the cross on top to profess Christianity.

Later, we took a new route along a Barranco (river/canal) that lead to the sea. The area reminded me like the Moriches inlet, with a narrow coastline, fisherman, and jetties.

Then we ventured over to the Ermita, a small church built to remember a Miracle that happened back in the 1300's. First we tried to guess the miracle. We decided from the picture "ok, no fish for a really long time, then one day, lots of fish!" Wrong.
 As we learned, a priest was going to travel to a nearby town to give communion to a sick man. However, when he tried to cross the little river up north, the host was lost in the water. However, the miracle of this tale is that the host traveled downstream, in the mouth of fish, and was placed in the priests chalice. Boy were we wrong!

After learning about the milagro, we ventured along the coast (where i learned the term for picnic area, merendero coming from merendar- to have an afternoon tea/snack- but you can merendar at a merendero any time of day!)

After 4 hours of activity, I returned my bike into the center of the city, but not without more free history lessons! I got to see the alter that was built for the first mass after King Jaime conquered Valencia- which later the Cathedral was built around! Cool! It is RIGHT there but I would have never have stopped to peer in this little window door without our Liaison!

Can't wait for another culturally rich day trip with Rubén!

PS none of these photos are mine, i was too lazy to take out my camera!