The Yesa Lake shines shines a bright unworldly cyan under a cerulean sky. The waters flirt with turquoise and the banks are dry and bone-chalk. Fields of furry yellow reeds peel back from the shore to rolling green hills. This was a place of dead towns and broken walls sitting juxtaposed with intense, pastoral beauty.
Read moreEast From Madrid #3: Castles from the Sea
The sea would remain our companion for the morning. The big aquamarine slab of glitter that was Valencia’s languid coast. The heat, palpable and clingy, met with the breeze on the hill at the first stop of interest through Valencia’s ugly northern outskirts. The monastery of El Puig - one of the region’s great houses - sat, bursting out of the titular village around it. A rosy pink crenellated slab of old stones surrounded by boxy hodgepodge houses that didn’t hint at luxury. Then rice fields. Then the line of holidays high rises and then the sea.
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