Madrid Community historical timeline

Valencia’s history is Mediterranean — a succession of powers arriving by sea and leaving their agriculture, language and buildings behind.

Rome

Founded in 138 BC as a colony for retired soldiers, and destroyed and refounded more than once. The archaeological centre under the Almoina square shows the layers directly.

Al-Andalus

Muslim rule from 714 brought the irrigation systems, rice, citrus, sugar cane, paper and the crop rotations that made this one of the richest agricultural regions in Europe. The taifa of Balansiya was briefly taken by El Cid in 1094 and held until 1102.

The conquest

James I of Aragon took the city in 1238 and created the Kingdom of Valencia as a separate realm within the Crown of Aragon, with its own laws and parliament.

The golden age

The fifteenth century was the region’s peak: silk, Mediterranean trade, the Lonja built as a merchant exchange, the first printing press in Spain, and a flowering of literature in Valencian.

Decline

The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 removed a third of the population and much of the agricultural skill, and the region lost its separate legal institutions in 1707 after backing the losing side in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The 1957 flood

In October 1957 the Turia burst into the city, drowning dozens of people and leaving parts of Valencia under several metres of water. The response was to divert the whole river into a new channel south of the city, leaving the old bed dry through the centre — and after a long public campaign against a plan to build a motorway in it, that bed became the park it is today.

Modern

Citrus exports from the nineteenth century, the capital of the Republic in the Civil War, mass tourism from the 1960s, and autonomy restored in 1982.