Valencia tide times

Valencia sits on Spain's central eastern Mediterranean coast at about 39 degrees north, the third-largest Spanish city and the working port that handles the bulk of the western Mediterranean container traffic between the Suez Canal approach and the Rotterdam-Antwerp delta. The city sits on the coastal plain (l'Horta) where the Turia river historically reached the Mediterranean, with the dredged container terminal of the Port of Valencia at the harbour mouth and the long Malvarrosa and Cabanyal beach corridors immediately north. 3 metres and neaps dropping near flat.

The astronomical signal is genuinely tiny because the Mediterranean connects to the Atlantic only through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. What matters more on a day-to-day basis is meteorological tide. Easterly storms (gota fría / cold-drop low-pressure systems) in autumn can stack water against the coast and lift apparent water level by 30 to 50 centimetres on sustained events.

The October 1957 Riada de Valencia flood (3,700 cubic metres per second of Turia discharge through the historic city centre, killing at least 81 people and inundating the Eixample district) drove the most consequential public-works decision in modern Valencian history: the Plan Sur diverted the entire Turia channel south around the city in 1969, and the original riverbed through the city centre was rehabilitated through the 1980s as the 9-kilometre linear Jardín del Turia park system that remains the green lung of the city. The defining ecological feature of the southern coast is the Albufera de Valencia, a 21-square-kilometre brackish lagoon separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow sand bar — the dehesa pine forest — about ten kilometres south of the city centre. The Albufera was historically a tidal estuary and is now a freshwater-dominated lagoon dominated by reed beds and rice cultivation.

The surrounding rice fields provide the bomba and senia rice varieties that make Valencian paella what it is, with the dish born on the lagoon edge as a midday meal for the rice farmers — eel (anguila), garrofó beans, ferraúra and tabella green beans, snails (vaquetes), rabbit, and chicken cooked in the wide flat pan over an open orange-wood fire. Saffron and rosemary finish the dish; rice is bomba or senia, never long-grain. The working port at Valencia handles roughly 5 million TEU per year and ranks among the busiest container ports in the Mediterranean.

The Marina Real Juan Carlos I marina city built for the 32nd America's Cup in 2007 sits between the working port and the Malvarrosa beach corridor. Sailing fleets out of the Real Club Náutico de Valencia, the cruise calls at the cruise terminal, the Albufera lagoon paseo en barca traditional flat-bottomed-boat tours, and the Las Arenas and Malvarrosa beach windows all read the wider weather pattern more than the tide table. Puertos del Estado is the authoritative Spanish tide source and operates the Valencia reference gauge; Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this page.