151214 History Talk 14th Dec: Valencia: the Biography of a City

Date: 14th December

Location: Salón de Actos, Espai la Senieta, Moraira (next to the large free car park)

Subject: Valencia: the Biography of a City

Lecturer: Peter Atkinson

The lecture will cover the history (economic, cultural, architectural and morphological) of Spain’s third city, from its Roman origin as a planned, new town in 138 BC, through to its 15th-century ‘Golden Age’, and on to the financial excesses and mismanagement of the present century. There is more to the story than you might expect, such as: the complete destruction of the city three times in its first 1,300 years, on each occasion by a different culture (Roman, Islamic and Christian); the huge scale of the silk industry until its sudden demise in the 19th-century; and the frequency and severity of the flooding which finally led to the diversion of the River Turia in the 1960s.