Valencia is known as a discreet place, happy with its relaxed lifestyle and not too concerned that the world passes it by. But Spain's third city is changing. Stung by Barcelona's Olympics and Seville's Expo, by Bilbao's popular new museum and Madrid's smart opera house, Valencia is asserting itself.
It is currently the most imaginative building site in Spain, if not Europe. By the millennium it will be ready to startle and to entertain; already it offers much more than adjacent beaches, sunshine and paella.
The centrepiece of Valencia's new-found chutzpah is the City of Arts and Sciences, a string of four great tourist attractions, stretching over 2km and strategically placed on the wide river bed of the Turia, which was long ago diverted and drained.
The Turia once circled the old city centre of Valencia but for decades it has been given over to gardens, fountains and football pitches. Now, in a once neglected part of town, it is brimming again with water, pumped in and bright blue this time rather than sludgy brown, which laps around a complex devoted to the arts. The city has three auditoria, with one seating 2,500 and another, given over to science, designed as a museum of the sensations. It also has Europe's largest aquatic park and, already completed, L'Hemesferic, a vast Omnimax concave wide-screen cinema which doubles as a planetarium and laser show.
Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava as a giant eye, it shows how modern materials and imaginative design can work in an environment where the skies are blue and the light brilliant. Naturally, the eye blinks, its sides opening and closing in 20 minutes.
It is proving a great success and when the complex is complete at least three million visitors a year are expected to flock to this "city within a city", carefully located between the heart of Valencia and its beaches.
While one of the largest construction projects in Europe races ahead, all paid for by the provincial government, the rest of Valencia looks after business.
The soul of the city is best revealed in its market, the largest and certainly the most colourful in Spain. Under an art deco canopy, the richness of the region's soil and seas explodes in colour, profusion and variety.
Opposite the market is an older example of Valencian trading acumen, the confidently spacious late 15th century Gothic of the Lonja, a cathedral given over to mammon, with barley sugar columns supporting a vast vaulted roof.
Built as a commodity exchange when Valencia was the financial and cultural hub of the Mediterranean, it is still home to traders - in stamps, coins and collectables.
Close by is another historic market, a small circular space like a cockpit, where dealers in haberdashery and ceramics confront each from 19th century stalls, for all the world looking like caricatures from a Goya watercolour.
On Sundays the whole area becomes a bazaar, offering everything from canaries to designer clothes, from leather goods to religious mementoes.
Here you are on the edge of the old city, a maze of 16th century palaces and slums, which links the cathedral to the river. A few years ago these narrow alleys would have looked threatening, and with reason.
Now they are given over to new bars and restaurants and to the apartments of the aspiring middle classes. At the moment the old city totters between picturesque seediness and sedate repair as it undergoes this essential facelift.
Reconstruction is transforming the eclectic cathedral - a mix of Gothic, Romanesque and Baroque - into a cleaned and gilded art treasure. Elsewhere, the facelift of this sleepy city is almost complete, notably across the river.
You pass through the towers of Serranos, a gatehouse built in the 14th century and also recently smartened up; watch the footballers in the dusty river bed and arrive at the Museo de Bellas Artes.
For years this old monastery slumbered. Now it has been beautifully restored as Spain's second art gallery (after the Prado) with a lapis lazuli domed roof which sheds a blue glow over the central exhibition space.
Some galleries are ultra modern; others complement the retained cloister. The museum holds works by Goya and Velazquez, but perhaps more interesting is the earlier art, the monumental altars ransacked from the city's many desecrated religious buildings in the 19th century and now safely gathered here.
Between the old and the ultra-modern there is another Valencia, which is increasingly picturesque. This is the result of the rebuilding of the city in the late 19th century, when ornate palaces to commerce were constructed by architects with more imagination than sense.
All around the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, the main square, are bizarre constructions built in a kind of Baroque modernism, totally at odds with urbane refinement or good taste. Perhaps the ultimate of these frivolities is the main station, both modernist and Moorish, its exterior decorated with colourful ceramic tiles praising the fertility of the region.
The living is comfortable in Valencia. The numerous small bars offer some of the best tapas in Spain; the restaurants still supply three good courses for around £5 or, in the case of Canyar, the very best local fish in the town centre in a £20 banquet. Transport is cheap, the sun invariably shines and there is always an alley or a courtyard or a garden that needs exploring.
And if you do tire of the city, just to the east, a 10-minute ride away, are the beaches of las Arenas and la Malvarrosa, with white sand, beach bars and a newly restored promenade. Anyone seeking something a little less blatant can dip southwards to Albufera, a lagoon famous for its sunsets and wildlife.
In the past, Valencia was claustrophobic, hot and inward-looking. Now it is attempting to emulate Barcelona as a modern city, with its Norman Foster-designed conference centre and a new glass concert hall, as well as the City of Arts and Sciences.
But, as it polishes up its cosmopolitan panache, Valencia's traditional charms remain in place. This is a city for discerning visitors; it is not a superficial one-day wonder.