A harp. A dinosaur skeleton. A viking helmet. A human eye. It's hard, standing in the middle of Santiago Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, looking at the work of the town's most famous architect, to find a reference equal to his imagination. The local politicians hoped that these buildings would do for Valencia what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim did for Bilbao—and they have. In addition to drawing architecture buffs, the project has become a portal to the rest of the city. Valencia's culture is deep, spanning the Roman occupation to the twenty-first century. Add to that a relaxed attitude, a charming network of bars and cafés, and prices far lower than in Barcelona and Madrid.

I decide that it is a biker's city, and pedaling around on a sparkling late-October day provides me with a quick geography lesson. The center is a compact and gorgeous Old Quarter sequestered within the city's historic walls. Between the center and the sea is Calatrava's arts complex, and on the waterfront is the port, revitalized for the 2007 America's Cup, as well as a series of repurposed warehouses along a stretch of beach. The new vibrancy is actually the result of decades of well-planned and sweeping regeneration.

The first step was diverting the Turia River around the city and transforming the riverbed into Jardín del Turia, a five-mile-long public park, one of the best examples of urban renewal I have seen. The green space—filled with bikers, joggers, and families—also cleverly connects formerly isolated neighborhoods near the port and business center. More than fifteen bridges dot the park and showcase a variety of architectural styles, from my favorite, Puente del Mar, a stone walkway built in the 1800s, to the most recent Calatrava creation, nicknamed Puente de la Peineta ("Ornamental Comb") for its elegant, toothlike spurs.

Valencia's dynamism pumps daily at the Mercado Central in the Old Quarter. The Art Deco building houses one of Spain's largest markets beneath towering iron and stained glass domes that resemble a Victorian London railway station. Visiting it is an introductory field trip through Spain's rich culinary scene: More than a hundred colorful stalls are devoted to jamón Ibérico, local cheese, dozens of types of sausages, wild mushrooms, countless varieties of fruits and vegetables, and shoals of seafood—sardines, botargo, bacalao, live eels, and hundreds of little marinated fish. Twentysomething men in chef's jackets jostle middle-aged women with hefty shopping carts for the day's best produce (I wish they would take me home for lunch). Across the street is another of the city's highlights, Lonja de la Seda, the former silk exchange and an exquisite example of Gothic architecture dating from 1482. The merchants understood that you close a better deal if your surroundings are aesthetically pleasing. Delicate curved pillars in the shape of palm trees support the vaulted ceiling of the entrance hall, and Gothic and Arabic arches—a sign of the city's multicultural legacy—look onto a shady courtyard of orange trees, where I sit reading until the space is invaded by a troop of kindergarteners. Moving from the mercantile to the spiritual, I make my way to the Santa Maria Cathedral in the heart of the Old Quarter, which has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In my opinion, the neoclassical details spoil the austere beauty of the original thirteenth-century architecture, but I find the dark Goya canvases in its side chapel powerful and unnerving—in one, demons lurk above an unrepentant dying man while a worried Saint Francis Borgia looks on. One of the supposed Holy Grails lies in another chapel, but I'm ready for more mortal pleasures. I stroll to Horchatería Santa Catalina, a restaurant around the corner, in search of a farton (yes, that's really its name)—a briochelike pastry that's dipped into a nut-flavored milk concoction—and a Valencian specialty called horchata, a local drink not to be confused with the Mexican version. It's popular with the city matrons who gather to gossip in the Art Nouveau space.