Letter from Valencia Alan Finnegan, who learned the skills of his trade in Dalkey, Co Dublin, runs a bar called the Gambrinus in the main square of the Spanish city of Valencia.
Next door his brother runs another one called Finnegan's. The two men give every impression of great prosperity as the customers pile in off the crowded pavements of a warm evening for drinks and tapas of huge proportions.
The city's second Bienal festival of the arts starts this month and the brothers look as though they will prosper further. This city is preparing to greet even greater numbers of Spanish and foreign visitors than usual attracted by Valencia's keen - even manic - desire to put itself on the map.
At the beginning of the 21st century it wants to become cool and fashionable, the place for northern Europeans to go for weekend breaks, the place that Barcelona was in the 1990s.
Though it has only half the population of Barcelona, Valencia has advantages that Barcelona lacks.
The British architect Will Allsop, himself a star of the Bienal, put it succinctly. "Valencia is light, Barcelona is shadow."
Both cities sit by the Mediterranean but the sun is more at home in Valencia.
It's difficult not to agree. There's nothing really wrong with Barcelona. Hemmed in by its mountains, that city's inhabitants grew rich, first on the heavy industry and textiles in its interminable suburbs and then on the mass tourism of the Costa Brava.
But Valencia's a gentler place. Its fortunes were - and indeed are - built on the oranges and other produce from its market gardens which can produce three bumper crops a year. The people of Barcelona went to work in factories and mills; the Valencians were in the fields in the sun.
Valencians are proud of their history and they delight in their intriguingly named 14th-century monarch, Pedro the Ceremonious.
They are proud of their language. Valencian is a sort of Catalan, but the locals claim it's different from the sort spoken in Barcelona.
In any case, the Valencians are more forgiving about linguistic politics. "Go to Barcelona and try to speak Castillian Spanish and you take your life in hands," says a journalist from Madrid. But she adds, "In Valencia people are more relaxed."
Until recently, Valencian was spoken mainly in the countryside but now it's on the school curriculum and, like Irish in Dublin, and is becoming more popular with the urban young.
"I only speak Castillian Spanish when I'm really angry," says Joan at the bookshop.
But the city has got more immediate cultural priorities. It's using its sun and its money to thrust itself forward as a centre for arts and fashion. And it has a head start, since Santiago Calatrava, one of the world's two or three greatest architects, is a local boy.
He has created the beginnings of an astonishingly modernist city on the site of Valencia's greatest catastrophe. In 1957 the River Tzria broke its banks in the most horrendous fashion, bringing death, injury, mud and destruction throughout the city.
The city fathers decided that it should never happen again, so they moved the bed of the Tzria physically out of harm's way into the outskirts.
That left a stretch of valuable land in the city centre which has been reclaimed over the years. It's home today to Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences, a fine ultra-modernistic combination of planetarium and museum and walkways. It's set in pools and gardens planted with roses and lavender that are alive with eager butterflies.
The architect's genius has made a wonderful combination with the medieval cathedral and baroque churches of the old town.
And the Valencians are taking time at their Bienal to try to fashion a new utopia. Its inauguration took place in true utopian style. The old market, transformed into a leisure centre was the scene of a party. All were welcome. No entrance fee. Drinks and food on the town hall.
Meanwhile the city's children have been asked for their views on what makes a nice city. And at an old former monastery on the edge of town, now beautifully restored, there is a workshop where they study ways of getting the most vulnerable groups in society - the young, the incapacitated and the old - better cared for. Perhaps the old monastery is not the ideal place for such an affair. For a long time it was a prison. During the civil war, when Valencia became the capital of the republic after the government was evacuated from Madrid, political prisoners were kept here, a practice Franco continued after he overthrew the republic in 1939. In the cloister, they point to the second floor where those facing execution spent their last hours.
No everyone is happy with today's Valencia. Protest groups still complain that not enough is done for the homeless and that those who are pushing the city's transformation are always the same small group. Alan the bar owner certainly feels like that.
But, given the new buzz in Valencia, if he offered me a small shareholding in the Gambrinus, I'd certainly buy it. If I could afford it.