Patrimonial Valencia: Research and Descriptive Portfolio Carly Roberts
Site #1
Barrio del Carmen Valencia’s Barrio del Carmen is the oldest part of the city of Valencia. The protection and consistent revitalization of the Carmen district is representative of the historic Valencian interest in self-preservation. The Carmen district has seen destruction as well as revitalization - when Napoleonic forces attacked Valencia during the Peninsular War, cannons were shot at the Torres Quart, which still bears the evidence of the bombardments of 1808. El Carme is comprised of the stretch of neighborhood from the Torres de Serrano to the Torres Quart. It borders on the Plaza de la Virgen and, largely, the Ciutat Vella neighborhood. It was incorporated into Valencia when the new wall in the 14th century was constructed by Pedro II of Valencia. For a long time the Carmen district was much like Amsterdam’s red light district. Valencia, being a port city, had a signifiant prostitution class because of the movement of seafarers through the Mediterranean. It has been a suburb, a refuge, a brothel, the home of the medieval aristocracy, and finally the convent, which served those living outside the city wall. It gets its name from this convent, the convent of Carmen Calzado, which is now the Carmen Cultural Center, which was originally built in 1238.
Barrio del Carmen is the essential neighborhood in Valencia, rich with history and vibrant with art and nightlife today. There are more than 1,000 years of history in the streets of this neighborhood. Its iconic epicenter is the Plaza del Carmen, somehow comes even more alive during Las Fallas, during which there are many parties in the streets, as well as concerts and parades. The neighborhood is home to many iconic plazas other than the Plaza del Carme, such as Plaza Lope de Vega and Plaza Santa Ăšrsula. There are also two key churches present in the neighborhood - La Iglesia San NicolĂĄs, famous for its frescoes, and Iglesia Santa Catalina. It is possible to walk the ancient street of the aristocracy, Calle de Caballeros, and see parts of the old Muslim Wall while passing by storefronts coated in elaborate, colorful, and visually complex murals and graffiti. The street art alone is enough of an attraction. The Carmen convent, now converted into the Carmen Cultural Center, is situated within the barrio and is a hotbed of the Valencian artistic community as well as a space for contemporary art to thrive. The barrio also contains a multitude of diverse restaurants and tapas bars. It has everything from vegan poke bowls to traditional Spanish cuisine. The tiny, quirky Casa de los Gatos, along with iconic cultural sites such as Plaza Negrito, makes El Carme a hub for tourists. It is hard to define the Barrio del Carmen. While it is open and inviting, an exact description of its energy, its color seem to be totally and completely elusive. It is an entire neighborhood, ancient and reimagined over thousands of years, which is ultimately a concept so human, but also so emblematic of the city of Valencia. The city beautifully and nobly reconciles its ancient history with a rich present and future.
Site #2 The Carmen Cultural Center is prolific. Named after Carmen Calzado, the building itself was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1983 after being restored several times, finally finished in 2011. It now serves as the headquarters of the city’s consortium of museums. Structurally, the Carmen Cultural Center comprises 9 exhibition halls and 2 cloisters over 7,500 square meters. From the outside, its blue dome blends seamlessly into the architectural makeup of the city, echoing the blue dome of the Museo de Bellas Artes. Presently, the Carmen Cultural Center is used for concerts, lectures, performances, film screenings as well as filming, and literary events. Its history is as profound as its contemporary function in the city. It was founded in 1281, with the creation of the 13th century Gothic cloister. The Gothic cloister is the main space of access and is centered upon entrance of the Cultural Center. The convent served people outside of the main city wall of Valencia before the Barrio del Carmen was incorporated into the city with a new and more expansive wall. The convent was built with a Renaissancestyle monastery garden as well as a Gothic garden, testifying to the transformation and expansion of the convent across many centuries. It was declared a public building in the 19th century, which began the start of the Barrio del Carmen as a prominent neighborhood. The Carmen Cultural Center was where the painter Joaquin Sorolla and his good friend, prominent Valencian writer Blasco Ibáñez would hang out with young artists, making it a center of growth for the Valencian artistic community which still holds true today.
Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània Carrer del Museu, 2, 4, 46003 - Barrio del Carmen consorcimuseus.gva.es/centro-del-carmen/ - 963152024
The contemporary exhibitions of the Carmen Cultural Center are globalized and localized. It has featured art from Spanish artists such as Jesús Madriùån, popular for his portraiture, and Pichiavo, the art duo concerned with uniting classical and urban art traditions. It has also featured the work of Chinese artist Xu Bing, featuring his massive installation piece interrogating language as a message and a vessel in fictionalized characters meant to mimic the Chinese alphabet. Both the Museo de Bellas Artes and the Carmen
Cultural Center are deeply concerned with placing contemporary work in the context of Spanish, and specifically Valencian, antiquity and patrimony. While the interior of the Carmen Cultural Center is defined by the exhibition halls and cloisters, representing both Gothic and Renaissance eras, the exterior itself is an architectural mixture. It is both essential in understanding Valencian patrimonial history and contemporary Spanish and Valencian art, showing us where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed.
Site #3
Museo de Bellas Artes Carrer de Sant Pius V, 46010 - La Saïdia - ova.es - 963870300
The Museo de Bellas Artes’ blue dome stands like a beacon in Valencia’s La Saïda. Inside the museum, the lobby is open, even echoing. The vast cerulean ceiling is studded with gold plates that reflect across the windows of the museum’s research library. The ceiling seems to mimic stars in the night sky. The Museo de Bellas Artes is located next to Viveros Park, across the Turia riverbed from the Torres Serranos. From the outside, it is quite imposing, elaborate in its stone design with massive doors. The museum is quite spectacular - about 80% of the artwork is by Valencians and it is considered to be Spain’s second best museum only after Madrid’s El Prado. The structure itself has been a church, a convent, a hospital operated by nuns, an art academy, a palace, and finally, during the Peninsular War, the headquarters of Napoleon’s forces. Architect Juan Bautista Pérez Castiel, who was also master of works on the Cathedral, was responsible for its design - which was carried out between 1683 and 1744. The Museo de Bellas
Artes also houses a complete collection of Gothic panels whose quality is unparalleled. The stunning Courtyard of the Vich Ambassador, one of the most important 16th century Renaissance courtyards, is found within the museum, with rich blue walls and impressive arches. The Bellas Artes Museum creates a dialectic of conversation; a dialogue between a patrimony of artistic Spanish history and a contemporary meditation on present Valencia. The museum takes the subjective and individual experience of Spanish art and places it within the context of the nation’s artistic tradition as a whole. It contains multiple artists’ experiences of Spain, including some of Spain’s most prolific painters such as Velasquez and Goya. In the curation of the Bellas Artes Museum, contemporary pieces are placed among masterful artworks well over 300 years old, true pieces from antiquity, and even Renaissance-era artwork. This creates the visual representation of Spanish artistic heritage, elucidating the connections between what is being created in present or has been created in recent history and an ancient lineage of tradition. It can be surprising encountering artwork from the 1980s dispersed among the works of Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. This site is essential as the ability to perceive and understand connections between certain eras of Spanish history, the way events, people, recurring symbols, sensations, and emotions persist across cultures is in many ways the same practice of cultural competency and understanding. The free Bellas Artes Museum’s access to hundreds of pieces of art, temporary exhibitions of Picasso and Sorolla, is essential access to that same cultural competency and understanding of Valencia. The artists it features are absolutely essential representations of Valencia itself as well as, on a larger scale, Spain.
Site #3 continued
Joaquín Sorolla Exhibit at Bellas Artes The Joaquín Sorolla exhibit at the Museo de Bellas Artes demonstrates and showcases the most essential painter of Valencia’s coastal landscapes. The exhibit features the work of Joaquín Sorolla, alongside the long legacy of later artists, from other Spanish Impressionist artists, to his daughter and his sonin-law, to a new mode of Latin American Modernismo. Joaquín Sorolla’s work is a representation of the Valencian landscape and people in the mode of his Impressionist works of Valencia’s beaches and the Mediterranean Sea. Sorolla was born in 1863, and had an incredibly successful career. Sorolla was said to have drawn his inspiration from the dazzling light on the waters by his home. All of his beach scenes are marked by sharp contrasts of light and shade as well as the textbook Impressionist vigorous brushstrokes. The painting Sad Inheritance was the major turning point in his career. The painter’s origins are a sad inheritance - Sorolla came from a poor family, and was orphaned at the age of 2, which is perhaps why family clearly
became so important to him later in life as his career as a painter developed. He was admitted to the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia at the mere age of 15. He later won a commission to paint United States president William Howard Taft in 1909. Sorolla’s emotionally-infused Impressionist style is demonstrated in his piece María convaleciente, completed in 1907. It was painted during his oldest daughter Mari’s recovery from tuberculosis while she recovered at the Sorolla family’s estate in the mountains of El Prado. What is perhaps must notable about the piece is its texture, which reflects Sorolla’s anxieties as a worried father. In the background, along the edifice of the building, the lines of the painting reach towards María’s face, which is strikingly neutral and still. Her face is brought into a calm focus among the rapid, forward movements of Impressionist brushstrokes. The brushstrokes composing her face are muted. The sense of movement captures Sorolla’s frustration and sense of helplessness, the world rushing by his daughter without the ability to stop it. Because of the clear lines and neutral expression, María is rendered melancholic and shaken, her expression almost eerie. The palette reflects a tenderness, the pale peach tones, deep and warm, envelop Sorolla’s daughter in a sense of care. She is swaddled - in both this color and in the bulky clothes and hat in which she is depicted - in an infant-like way. The stark and noticeable disparity of the bright green shrubbery and her black hat, along with the blues behind her disrupt the soft and affectionate pinks. She seems to blend in with the landscape. In merging her with the building behind, there is the suggestion that she exists in a liminal way during her recovery, not present in the painting or really anywhere else. This elucidates the fact that recovery is a period of waiting and anticipating. Viewers can vicariously witness the delicate nature of recovery in María convaleciente as well as the anxieties of a parent in Sorolla’s stunning piece.
Jardín de Monforte Site #4
Carrer de Montfort, S/N, 46010 - La Saïda 963525478
The Jardines de Monforte have been a garden space for centuries, but the gardens as we know them today were obtained by the Marquis de San Juan in the late 1850s. The Marquis de San Juan was a wealthy silk merchant and major taxpayer dedicated to patronage and philosophy. He hired Sebastián Monleón, who had also designed Valencia’s Plaza de Toros, to design the garden space. When the Marquis died, the wealthy Valencian Monforte family obtained it. Both the San Juans and the Monfortes were involved in international trade and experimented with botanical life from around the world through their ownership of the garden space. This can be seen in the grandest sense in that the presence of an Australian pine is only seconds away from a tree whose origins are in the Himalayas. The Jardines de Monforte have three main sections: the Pabellón de Recreo, which is the family’s vacation home, the Neoclassical Gardens, and El Bosquet, the “little forest,” which reflects 19th century Romanticism. In the 1950s the Monforte family donated the grand complex to the people of Valencia. The family’s old home is now an Oficina de Matrimonio and the garden is one of the city’s most popular places for wedding photos. When walking, the Jardines de Monforte are almost hidden on Carrer de Montfort, the gates seemingly blending in with the tall walls that one later realizes are actually the walls fencing in the beautiful park. The exterior of the Jardines de Monforte essentially a wrought-iron gate, and upon entrance, one finds themselves walking along the side of the Pabellón de Recreo. The Neoclassical Gardens are peppered with nine nude female statues in a carefully manicured hedge maze, along with clearings with orange and lemon trees. Visitors are greeted by two statues of lions. El Bosquet is kept more wild, still decorated with a few classical-esque statues and complemented with a reflective pool. The Monforte children played in the gardens, primarily in El Bosquet. The Jardines de Monforte are a decadent natural space that is almost frozen in time. Simply, to have such a lush and beautiful space tucked away in the city is a kind of miracle. It is a preservation of artistic heritage, in Gothic and Neoclassical landscaping as well as the era of the San Juan and Monforte family that enjoyed a golden age in the Valencian economy. The Jardines de Monforte are a space of repose and deep, deep history.
Site #5
Los Viveros/ Jardines de Real Carrer de Cavanilles, 1, 46010 - La Saïda 962084304
The Jardines de Real are most likely Valencia’s oldest botanical park. They were designed by Valencia’s Muslim King Abd al Aziz, who ruled during the 11th century, for his palace. The connection between his rule and the creation of Viveros is in the flourishing of an agricultural economy; Viveros has been a large botanical space ever since. The Jardines de Real were used by El Cid during the Christian reconquest of Valencia during the 11th century. In 1238, James I of Aragon finalized the Reconquista of Valencia and, like El Cid, used the Jardines de Real to do so. After this, the Jardines de Real were used by Christian monarchs until the 19th century. All the while, the gardens and palace grew into one of Spain’s most important royal spaces. Throughout the centuries, they have been a base for flora to be transported from Valencia to other parts of Spain; a sort of expansive outdoor botanical nursery. They also have been a very popular vacation and honeymoon destination for Spanish royalty, however the park has seen much destruction. While the impressive botanical space itself remained intact, during the Peninsular War the royal palace was actually destroyed by the people of Valencia in 1810 so Napoleon couldn’t occupy it or destroy it himself. In 1841, Los Viveros were declared a municipal patrimonial space and an artistic space for the people as per royal decree - it has remained so ever since with the addition of a school, an outdoor cafe, the Museum of Natural History, as well as an extensive rose garden. The park itself is now equipped with many modern amenities that make it a truly 21st century park.
Los Viveros has a designated dog park, public bathrooms, and a large and flashy fountain. The fountain, situated within the rose garden, erupts and blares music, reminiscent of perhaps Vegas rather than patrimonial Spain. The Viveros Museum of Natural History itself contains one of Europe’s most important paleontological collection of skeletons and fossils, a sea shell collection, as well as an exhibition of Valencian ecosystems. It places special emphasis on the autonomous community of Valencia and the evolution of its ecosystems over time. Being located in the gardens, it is itself a meditation on the natural world. The complementary nature of this - learning about Valencian ecosystems in one of the most important and ancient botanical spaces in the region - is impeccable in its design. Children can be seen everywhere in Los Viveros, being led in guided educational activities by the local schools, visiting the Museum of Natural History, or simply playing in the park for a field trip or a recess. There are group exercise classes being held on the expanse of green at all times, from tai chi, to yoga, to aerobic hula hooping. Interestingly, there is a statue of the Dama de Elche in Los Viveros by the sculptor Enrique Cuùat, putting the image of the iconic bust on a trapezoidal pedestal. This contributes greatly to the patrimonial legacy of Los Viveros, which has not only seen the Peninsular War and the Reconquista, but also pays homage to a key cultural artifact of 4th century Iberia. The Jardines de Real hold so much of Valencia’s history - from their founding during the era of Muslim Valencia, to their strategic position in the Reconquista, to their withstanding the Peninsular War, then being used by royals, and finally the public - in almost every way imaginable.
Site #6
Plaza de la Virgen Plaรงa de la Verge, Ciutat Vella
Once the site of the old Roman forum of Valencia, the Plaza de la Virgen is home to the Cathedral, the Palacio de la Generalidad, and the Real Basilica de los Desamparados. The plaza is close to both the Plaza de la Reina and the entrance to expansive Barrio del Carmen. The Plaza de la Virgen is one of the most essential cultural sites of the city of the Valencia. It is transformed during Fallas into the space of one of the most intimate and tender traditions of the festival - La Ofrenda. During La Ofrenda, the plaza is filled with the scent of roses, offered by the women of Valencia, who bring bouquets to the iconic, towering statue of the Virgin Mary, who is fittingly placed in her eponymous plaza. The ceremony itself is touching, nestled between two of the most important religious sites in the city, as well as in the very center of the Ciutat Vella itself. Sculptor Silvestre Edeta's Turia Fountain in the plaza represents the lifeblood of the city, the bronze statue of a reclining Neptune along with eight naked female figures depict the Turia River itself along with the eight irrigation canals fed by the river. The 17th century, baroque Real Basicilica de los Desamparados faces the center of the plaza. The plaza is bounded by this emblematic building, situating it as an important religious, cultural, and touristic site. In many ways, to visit the Plaza de la Virgen is to put your finger on the pulse of the city. It is always lively, with tourist groups and local Valencians enjoying the surrounding outdoor tapas bars. Close by is a beautiful orange and lemon grove enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Beyond this is the iconic Cafe de las Horas with its own baroque interior complete with its famous Agua de Valencia just down the way.