After breakfast we met Sarah for the bus to Albuferia and enjoyed a relaxing walk through the park with its abundance of Mediterranean plants and birds. We called in at the information centre and bird hides on a small lagoon, seeing little egrets and red legged stilts. Then we caught a guided boat trip to Palmera with an excellent guide who explained the features in English as well as Spanish. He showed us how much mud lies at the bottom, making the lake very shallow. Rice cultivation decreased the lake’s size but the plants are home to birds and insects.
At Palmera we chose a restaurant for lunch of paella de verduras. We were told there’d be an hour’s wait so in the meantime we went for a stroll round the town and saw the rice fields and more little egrets. After dining outside in the warm sunshine, we caught the bus back to Valencia. In the evening we ate at a Mexican restaurant with Sarah and walked back through the noisy streets with loud fireworks firing off all around. It’s normal for children to throw them in the streets during Fallas week and the police didn’t intervene so presumably it’s officially sanctioned as part of the fiesta.