City of Memory, City of Forgetting: Valencia in Layers

The Metropolitan Museum recently described seventeenth-century Nanjing as a city of accumulated memory: each fallen dynasty left behind another layer of temples, walls, ancient trees, and verses, until artists found themselves working entirely surrounded by the past. When the Ming fell in 1644, the people of Nanjing watched their own world join the strata beneath their feet.

I have been in Valencia only a few weeks, and I find myself reading it the way the Met read Nanjing — except that Valencia demands a correction to the model. Nanjing is a city where the past accumulates. Valencia is a city that has repeatedly chosen, or been forced, to forget. Its evolution is legible as much in its absences as in its monuments. Layers, yes — but also erasures.

The Romans founded Valencia in 138 BC under the name Valentia Edetanorum. Roman Consul Decimus Junius Brutus established the settlement on an island in the Turia River for veteran soldiers. Today, you can explore the preserved ruins of this original Roman founding at the Almoina Archaeological Museum in the heart of the city.

Valentia

The Romans founded the city in 138 BC, and Valencia still displays its own cross-section like an anatomical specimen. Beneath the cathedral square, at the Almoina, the excavated forum lies under glass: you stand on the modern pavement and look down through two thousand years. Few cities are so literal about their own stratigraphy.

Balansiya

Balansiya, islamic wall of Valencia.

The Islamic city, eighth to thirteenth centuries, survives less in stone than in water and law. The irrigation canals that feed the huerta were engineered under the Caliphate, and every Thursday at noon, at the Apostles' Gate of the cathedral, the Tribunal de les Aigües convenes to adjudicate disputes among the canals' farmers — an institution of Islamic origin, conducted in Valencian, on Christian ground, in continuous session for roughly a thousand years. It may be the most remarkable living artifact in Spain, and it is invisible unless you know to look.

The Conquest

In 1238 Jaume I took the city, and the mosque became the cathedral. The Christian order was superimposed on the Islamic plan the way fresco is laid over fresco — the older image never quite gone, bleeding through in the street pattern of El Carmen.

The Erased Layer

And here Valencia departs from Nanjing entirely. Before 1391, perhaps a tenth of this city was Jewish. The pogrom of that year annihilated the quarter; the expulsion of 1492 finished what the mob began. Unlike Toledo or Girona, Valencia preserves almost no material trace of that community — no synagogue, no quarter to walk through, barely a plaque. In the Nanjing model, every fallen world leaves ruins for artists to mourn over. Valencia's Jewish layer is the inverse: a memory with no monument, present only as absence. A city can be excavated for what it kept. It should also be read for what it destroyed.

The Golden Age

The fifteenth century made Valencia the metropolis of the western Mediterranean: La Lonja de la Seda rising like a Gothic stock exchange, the first printing press in Spain, the poetry of Ausiàs March, the Borgias exporting themselves to Rome. This is the layer the city is proudest of, and the one it shows visitors first.

1609: The Expulsion of the Moriscos

Then the second erasure. The expulsion of the Moriscos emptied the huerta of the very people whose ancestors had engineered its irrigation. Valencia lost perhaps a third of its population, and the countryside took generations to recover. The canals kept flowing; the hands that built them were gone.

Expulsión de los moriscos en el puerto de Denia, pintado en 1613 por Vicente Mestre.

The Bourgeois City

The nineteenth century wrote its prosperity in ceramic and iron — silk and oranges, the Mercado Central, the Modernisme of the Estació del Nord, a train station decorated like a promise that the good times were structural.

The Republic

For a year, 1936 to 1937, Valencia was the capital of Republican Spain. Here the Nanjing parallel sharpens: like the Ming loyalists who painted their grief in the decades after 1644, an entire generation of Spaniards mourned a fallen republic under the regime that replaced it — a dynasty of their own consigned, violently, to the realm of history. That layer, too, spent forty years unspeakable.

The Flood and the Garden

The most recent stratum I have written about elsewhere: the flood of 1957, the highway Franco's planners drew in the dry riverbed, and the citizens who demanded a garden instead and got one. The Turia Gardens are the first layer in this city's long history that Valencians chose for themselves, in the open, against the official plan. After two millennia of layers imposed and layers erased, the newest one is an act of collective will.

Nanjing's artists worked surrounded by the past. In Valencia the past is quieter and more selective — curated by conquest, edited by expulsion, and only recently written by its own citizens. To live here, I am learning, is to walk on all of it at once: the forum under the glass, the water in the canals, the absence where the Jewish quarter stood, the garden where the river was. A city of memory, yes. But also a city of forgetting — and the second kind has more to teach.

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