Why the tiled houses?

The modernistic heritage of the Cabanyal is not limited only to the tiled houses to which this book is dedicated, but it is also important to mark a limit here avoid dispersion, which too easy to fall into if we would have been looking for more poetic sides of El Cabanyal. But foremost we want to catalogue their most characteristic side: the tiled facades.

Because the interesting parts are also the bars of the windows, doors and balconies (and a lot of these bars is also on facades that do not have tiles); the balustrades, the mobila wood —Canadian pine— unique carvings on doors, windows, skylights, small look-outs; the bronze applications; the porthole designs of ventilation holes to the attics where fishing equipment is stored and fish is dried; the tiles on the inside of houses; the falseados that cover the upper part of the Venetian blinds of the balconies, that in many cases have wood work decorations or decorated iron-casts… It’s also peculiar the lay out of the village in form of a grid, the network of the streets, the crossings and squares that gave it a special space inside the urbanization by the sea. Also there was a way of life that had developed during these last centuries: a complex socio-cultural web which has permitted the survival of a village life-style inside the third largest city of Spain; one of the more important metropolitan areas south of Europe; and one of the Mediterranean’s most important harbours. In which is still preserved a particular form of relationship with the environment, a cultural independence that preserves the Valencian language as in no other part of the city of Valencia.

A lot of aspects have been left outside of this book. But we have to consider that, for the moment, it’s enough to catalogue the facades which are the most specific aspect, more than in other parts and villages of Valencia. Not to say that there is exclusively tiled facades in El Cabanyal. You will also find them in Port Avenue in Benimaclet, in BeterÛ, in Alm‡ssera and in some villages in Valencia surroundings, or in Chiva… but they are isolated cases and they are not really noteworthy areas as such. Anyway here we are, we made our contribution…