Valencia, Spain’s third city, is elegant and open-spirited, filled with Mediterranean light – though you only glimpse the sea when you go down to the beach to sample a paella, Valencia’s great contribution to gastronomic pleasure. From Arab times until today, Valencia has meant and still means rice – and oranges. Valencia’s architecture reflects the city’s exuberant success in Gothic days and the newly-thrusting, ultra-modern regionalism has brought the America’s Cup here twice in the past six years. Santiago Calatrava’s vast, fantastical and gleaming showpiece, the City of Arts and Sciences, set in a dried-out river bed as the culmination of 14 kilometres of park, is undoubtedly its supreme expression.

Calatrava, Valencian-born engineer-architect supreme, has always had his critics: today voices are raised about operating cost and maintenance and the general sense of grandeur. But few could deny the beauty of the cascading glass, the gleaming steel and dazzling concrete, the acrobatic forms of his assemblage of outsize buildings – opera house, science museum, sports stadium, arboretum-walkway along with an oceanarium by the older but also interesting architect Felix Candela. The complex and indeed the whole city should not be missed by anyone who wants an overview of modern Spain.

Evidence of the vigour of the city’s culture over the centuries is everywhere. The Fine Arts Museum is one of the most important in Spain, excellent in particular for Gothic and Renaissance painting – Valencia was Spain’s first port of call for many Renaissance ideas. The city’s luminous 19th-century painting, increasingly appreciated today, is also much in evidence. The IVAM was Spain’s first major gallery of modern art with an impressive permanent collection and important temporary exhibitions. The presence of the National Ceramics Museum, in a lush rococo palace, reflects continuous production of top-class ceramics from the 13th century onwards – Moorish in technique and design, its best elements perpetuated in what came after.

The Moors made mediaeval Valencia. Christians from Aragón reconquered it in 1238. The new masters built on Arab civilisation to achieve Mediterranean prominence and their own Gothic splendours. In an exuberant 19th-century city-centre, Art-nouveau and art-deco flourished, as Santiago Calatrava does today in the Turia riverbed.