Valencia faces due east onto the sea and has a nine-kilometre park where its river used to be, which between them give the city a sunrise and an all-day shade corridor.
The Turia is the fact that makes this an easy city to photograph in. After the 1957 flood the river was diverted around the city and the old bed was left, and it is now nine kilometres of park running through the middle of Valencia, sunk five metres below street level and planted with mature trees. That depth and that canopy mean there is dappled, usable shade along the whole length of it at two in the afternoon in August, which no other Spanish city of this size can offer. The east-facing coast gives the other half. The Malvarrosa and the Cabanyal get the sun straight out of the Mediterranean, and the Cabanyal behind them is a grid of low fishermen’s houses faced in glazed tile — cobalt, green, ochre, every house different — that is lit frontally for the first two hours of the day and then goes into shadow. It is the most colour available anywhere in this catalogue, and it is at its best at seven in the morning, which is the hour almost nobody asks for.
Pick the session and roughly when. Thirty seconds, and the price is fixed there.
They pick the hour, because in Spain the hour decides the photograph.
Edited photographs in your private gallery, on the turnaround stated for your session.
The mildest calendar of the six cities here: March, April, May, October and November all work without qualification, and February is usually 18 degrees and clear. Two warnings. The Fallas, in the week to 19 March, take the city over completely — hotels triple, the streets are full of gunpowder and it is wonderful and impossible to schedule anything around. And July and August are humid coastal heat, so the beach is a dawn location and the Turia is where the afternoon happens.
Here is where to shoot in Valencia, with ideal times and permit notes.
A grid of two-storey fishermen’s houses faced in glazed tile, one street back from the beach, each facade a different colour. It is lit from the front at sunrise because the streets run east to the sea. People live here and are tired of being a backdrop, so it is a quiet, early, respectful location or it is not one at all.
White concrete and blue water, and the most over-photographed architecture in Spain after the Alhambra. It only works at the two ends of the day: the white is unreadable under a high sun and the pools stop reflecting once there is a breeze. At sunrise it is empty, the water is still and the whole thing is worth the alarm clock.
The old riverbed, five metres below the street and under a closed canopy of plane trees. It is the answer to an August afternoon in this city, and the only large location in the catalogue where the time of day genuinely does not decide the photograph.
A freshwater lagoon twenty minutes south of the city, in a natural park, with flat-bottomed boats and rice paddies that hold a mirror of sky from flooding in November until the crop closes over in July. The sun goes down across the water and there is nothing on the horizon to interrupt it.
These come under the Valencia rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Valencia itself.
To photograph the Fallas, absolutely, and it should be booked the previous autumn. To photograph anything else, no. The city centre is closed to traffic, there is a mascletà at two every afternoon that stops everything within a kilometre, and a portrait session scheduled that week will spend most of itself walking around barriers.
Green from late June to early September, harvested in September, and then flooded and mirror-flat from November to April — which is the version worth photographing. The reflection season and the green season are different sessions and people usually want the one they have not seen in a photograph.
