Day 83: Valencia to El Saler

October 31, 2024

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Without the flock of "cattle egrets" that we had in the breakfast room yesterday, the whole thing looked much more impressive. So NH Center has regained its "ten jammer" rating with us.

We stopped by a bakery to get some buns for the road. These were the same ones that I had mentioned in writing to Laurie, as being almost blown out of my hand on Tuesday. At that time she asked if the buns had icing, an I replied no, because then they might have been heavy enough to stay put. This turned out to be misleading, because as you see in the photo, the icing supplied is quite lightweight. Anyway, there was no wind at all today!

We used the Turia park to pass through Valencia and to get on our way to the Albufera wetlands to the south. The park has a bikeway on either side, and is just such a super asset for the city. We floated down to the vicinity of City of Arts and Sciences with no noticeable effort. What a contrast to yesterday. A bike and a bike path can be such a great way to get around.

Puente del Ángel Custodio, one of the many crossing the park.

The architecture down by the City of Arts and Sciences remains stunning to us every time we pass by. It is usually only medieval buildings that impress us, and we hate the modern parts of cities - except here.

The bridge and the Science Museum. The bridge is called Pont l'Assut de l'Or, or the Goldrush Bridge.

Of course there is a bike lane for us on the bridge.

Here are two shots snapped while cycling and without looking at the camera, from the bridge.

We are over the bridge and looking at some of the apartment buildings in this part of town.

At this point we join EV8, and a passerelle on it takes us over the train tracks.

From the passerelle we have a good view of one of the few churches in this part of town, Iglesia de la Punta. We photograph this each time we pass, as does every other cycle tourist on EV 8 here.

The next big thing is the crossing of the Turia river, which lies here in the bed it was exiled to after being kicked out of town. Neither the river nor the bridge is impressive here.

We now are at the approaches to the Albufera park. Albufera is the Spanish word for "lagoon", but it is usually capitalized, so this is the Lagoon Park.

We are taking the route along the seaside, on the way to the little town of El Saler. That runs us into both sand and debris, no doubt both from the recent storms.

As we near El Saler, we are on the alert for signs of the flooding that has caused so much problem, and death, in the Valencia area these past days.

We cycled through bits of water like this with little problem.

Our hotel is the white building. El Saler's commercial district consists of one block.

Next door to our hotel is this restaurant, one of perhaps three. This is a major rice growing area, and said to be the original home of paella. So the restaurants are deemed arrosserias, or rice restaurants.

Whereas Paella is rice with all sorts of sea creatures, or chicken, on top, Arroz Abanda is plain rice cooked in fish stock.

We dropped some of our bags at the hotel, and carried on, intent on seeing if we could get on a boat and visit more of the lagoon. The jumping off point for boats, we knew, was El Palmar, so that was where we headed.

Up to this point, we had seen some small signs of the storms and flooding that had made the international news, but nothing that we would have much noticed without the news reports. Now signs of the nearby situations began to appear. The first was the fact that the coastal route had become clogged with traffic, including a large number of big transport trucks that normally would not come near such a small road.

At first we were puzzled by all the traffic, but we worked out what it must be, and later had that confirmed: On the east side of the lagoon are two major roads - the Autovia AP 7 and another, the C-3320. Both of these, we understand, were knocked out, to the extent that there were abandoned vehicles along them. That caused all the traffic bound for the big cities to the south to be routed right with ...us!

Part way along, as we made for El Palmar, there was a pullout called Mirador del Pujol. This is where a bridge crosses a watercourse that is leaving the lagoon and heading for the sea. It's called Gola del Pujol Nou. This is one spot where a boat ride on the lagoon can normally be secured. But as you see below, the sign for the rides is partially submerged. And in the next shot, the brickwork of the landing is seen to be underwater.

Not going to walk over to your boat here, just now.

This showed us that the overall level of the whole lake was up much higher than normal.

The bridge at the Gola del Pujol Nou turned out to offer a bike lane only on one side. That would normally be only a minor annoyance, but with all the traffic, switching sides of the road was a bit of a chore.

Now they tell me I can't go on this side!

When we reached the turn off for El Palmar, we found the way blocked by police. It was a bit puzzling because we and others on bikes were allowed through, and the white car behind the police officer also eventually set off down the road. We found out that since the road was essentially impassable close to and beyond El Palmar, only local vehicle traffic was being permitted, bicycles and their crazy riders excepted.

As we made our way to the town, we could quickly see flooded citrus orchards, flooded streets, and sadly for us, numerous boat ride businesses locked tight.

We pedalled through this one, keeping to the shallower right hand side.

By rights, this is a canal, but it's a flooded one.

The main town itself was dry, though there was not much at all going on.

In a place famous for paella and rice dishes, this looked to us like the epicentre of the cuisine. Fideua is like paella but with pasta. Con bogavante - is paella with lobster. Parrilladas is BBQ's or grilled - mariscadas - seafood.

There is about a foot of water in the orchard.

We continued south as far as El Perellonet, but found little of interest there. But on the way back, at the pullout, a team of rescue people had pulled up with their Zodiac.

They were getting ready to launch, but of course we did not know what their mission was.

The police asked us not to take our coffee break at that spot, and then helped us cross the busy road and get back on our way. Meanwhile another urgent alert had landed in our phone, asking the public to stay off the roads, to allow emergency personnel to do their thing.

We made our way on this, back to El Saler.

For some reason the white truck - marked Petit Forestier - had been going along the road in our direction, but just at our speed. We were on the paved shoulder, but I wondered if it was trying to protect us from being passed. But then an ambulance came along. We had seen it heading the other way earlier, along with four or more wailing police cars. Now, rather than step on the gas, Petit Forestier backed off the lane into that of the opposing traffic. That did allow the ambulance to speed off, but I found the whole thing curious.

Back at the hotel in El Saler, we weighed our options about tomorrow. We had reserved the day, still hoping to get onto the lagoon on a boat. But that was clearly not going to happen. That left cycling in the region around El Palmar. Komoot had a few suggested rides, but these were either El Saler to El Palmar, or El Palmar around the west side of the lagoon, to Valencia, and back around on the east side.

The hotel desk had a laminated map of the region on the counter, and I went to ask advice about where to cycle. The young man at the desk reacted in horror to my inquiry. He swept his hand over the area to the west of El Palmar and said that it was all destroyed, totally flooded. There was no way, no way, he stressed, to go anywhere near there. And it was he that confirmed that the Autovia out there was flooded, and closed. The only riding that was possible, he assured me, was back the way we came - to Valencia center - and back.

We thought about cancelling our stay tomorrow in El Saler and just returning to Valencia. But our booking is non cancellable. Since it's not far to Valencia, what we will probably do is to cycle back there, tour around the old town for a bit, and then return to our room in El Saler. Then the next day, we would be cycling to Valencia again, for our booking back at the NH Centre. It's not a convenient situation, but others in this region have obviously suffered a lot worse than that.

You can see El Saler and El Palmar on this, and the wiped out area to the west of the lake, with the impassable C3320 and AP-7. I notice that this Google map, from earlier this afternoon, says "Central Eastern Spain Floods".

Today's ride: 43 km (27 miles)
Total: 4,109 km (2,552 miles)

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