I've explored 5 continents, but there's only one place I'd move to tomorrow without hesitation

I was sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench, shoes tied loosely after a morning run, when I realized I had stopped taking pictures.

The riverbed below me curved like a green ribbon, cyclists slid past in a hush, and a father lifted his daughter onto a rental bike with the patience of a watchmaker.

I had already jogged past orange trees, dog walkers, a brass band rehearsing under a bridge, and three different playgrounds. The air smelled faintly of rosemary and damp earth. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and knew it without a single dramatic epiphany. If I had to move tomorrow, this would be the place. Valencia.

I have slept in tin-roof hostels and crisp hotels on five continents. I have eaten sambal in Singapore, sipped espresso in Rome, and watched fog roll across the Tasman Sea. There are cities I ache for when I am not in them.

But Valencia is the only place that makes my nervous system say yes before my brain drafts a list of pros and cons. It fits like a jacket I did not know was mine.

The place that keeps pulling me back

The first time I came to Valencia, a friend handed me a key and a fruit knife and said, “Come back with oranges.” It sounded like a joke until I realized the city is a soft chorus of citrus. The second time, I came for the running. Locals kept telling me there was a park where a river used to be. I imagined a pocket of grass with a bench. Instead I found the Jardí del Túria, nine kilometers of gardens, paths, soccer pitches, playgrounds, and palms stitched through the city like a secret artery.

That park undid me. I have run on mountain trails in New Zealand and city paths along the Hudson. I have trained beside canals in Amsterdam and in the shadow of volcanoes in Guatemala. The Turia feels different. It is generous to ordinary bodies. It is where people live, not just where they pass through. If you have spent years hunched over screens and schedules, being inside a city-sized park that expects nothing more of you than to move is almost medicinal.

A city scaled to the body

What I want from a home now is not spectacle. It is proportion. Valencia is scaled to daily life. The buildings are tall enough to hold shade and short enough to keep the sky. The sidewalks let two friends walk side by side without bumping shoulders. Bikes rule without drama. Cars yield without swagger. I can run errands in a loop and still be home in time to steep tea.

As a runner, I live on surfaces. Valencia’s surfaces are kind. Paths in the Turia cushion my knees. The promenade along Malvarrosa Beach gives my calves a reason to be thankful. Side streets in Ruzafa and El Carmen turn into slalom courses of laundry lines and laughter. I have never owned a city as a pedestrian the way I own Valencia. Maybe that is the wrong verb. The city invites you to borrow it with your feet.

And then there is the light. I grew up on fluorescent deadlines and office windows that pretended to be outdoors. Valencia’s light is patient. It slides across tiles and into courtyards. It warms stone the way a hand warms a shoulder. On winter mornings, it turns the city into a bowl of cream. In summer, it gleams on bicycle bells and the rims of cold glasses. You do not chase it. You live in it.

A market kid’s paradise

I am vegan. I volunteer at a farmers’ market on weekends. My particular form of joy is a good tomato and the name of the person who grew it. Valencia speaks that language fluently. Mercado Central is the obvious cathedral, all iron and glass and produce stacked like mosaics. But my favorite mornings happen in the smaller markets, where the spinach still carries a memory of the soil and the woman weighing your mushrooms remembers you liked the flat peaches last time.

You can build a life here on carrots and rice and sunlight. Paella gets all the headlines, and the meat versions deserve their history, but I will fight anyone who says the city does not know how to love a vegetable. I have eaten plates of grilled artichokes that made me swear softly. I have bought bundles of chard so green they looked back at me. I have stood at a counter drinking horchata so cold it reset my afternoon.

It is not just the shopping. It is the rhythm. Markets open early, lunch happens late, and neighbors talk while deciding between two heads of lettuce. The transaction is wrapped in a relationship. When I picture moving, I do not picture boxes and a shipping container. I picture a cart with a squeaky wheel and a list written on the back of an envelope. Tomatoes, rice from Albufera, parsley, lemons, olives. A loaf tucked under my arm.

Everyday joy, not just postcard

Travel has taught me that the hardest part of loving a place is telling the truth about its dailiness. Valencia does not ask me to pretend. The joy here is not sealed in a souvenir. It is watching a grandmother teach a child to skip rope in the park. It is a neighbor watering geraniums in a plastic chair and offering you a cool bottle of water with the label half peeled. It is a barista who remembers you take your cortado with oat milk and no sugar and asks if the run was good.

The city is not perfect. Summer heat presses. Bureaucracy can be a maze with polite guards. The tram sometimes takes its time. But even the friction has texture I can live with. I have spent plenty of hours wrestling with systems that make simple life feel like a privilege. Valencia’s inconveniences read as solvable puzzles, not insults.

And then there is fallas, a festival that looks like chaos and is actually choreography. For one madness-drenched week, the city fills with fireworks, sculptures, parades, and brass bands that appear and disappear like weather. The first time, I tried to schedule around it. The second time, I let it rearrange me. There is nothing like watching a neighborhood move together, grandparents and toddlers and teenagers and bored uncles, to remind you that civic joy is a muscle.

Work that breathes

When I left finance and started writing full time, I traded status for seasons. I measure days differently now. Morning light is a resource. Midday is for the kind of cooking that pairs with a keyboard. Evenings are for walks that let paragraphs knit themselves. Valencia holds that rhythm without commentary.

There are desks here that face sunlight and cafés that do not hustle you out when you pull a notebook from your bag. There is decent internet if you must upload and real human faces when you need to step away. On days when the draft feels stubborn, I lace up and run the Turia and pass a couple practicing tango under an arch and a cluster of teenagers inventing a game that probably has rules and probably does not. You cannot stay clenched in a city that insists on being used.

I have written in cities that drain me. I have written in cabins that made me too precious about the work. Valencia makes me practical. Words in the morning, market at noon, edits in the late afternoon, a bowl of something green, a walk when the heat softens. I do not have to perform a creative life here. I can live one.

The ocean that listens

Every city has a room where its voice gets quiet. In Valencia, that room is the sea. There is a section of the beach where the sand gives just enough, and the air feels like someone wrung out a cloud and let the drops hover. On certain days, the horizon looks drawn with a felt-tip pen. I have walked there with a mind so cluttered it felt like a junk drawer, and the ocean took one look and said, first, breathe.

I do not surf. I do not need to. I watch people carry boards like oversized punctuation and I feel included anyway. The ocean here has no interest in glamour. It invites everyone. Children squeal in three languages. Couples stroll in a silence that is not empty. Friends wave with an economy that suggests they will see each other tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

I am old enough to know what makes me stay in a place. Access to quiet matters. Access to other humans matters. Valencia gives me both in a single afternoon.

The part about leaving

Every city I have fallen for has its goodbye. In Tokyo, I cried in a train station because order felt like kindness I did not know how to repay. In Oaxaca, I left a market with two hands worth of chili and a mind not ready for the plane. In Granada, I watched a waiter fold napkins into triangles and thought about the luck of being alive.

Valencia’s goodbye is sneakier. I do not leave wrung out. I leave calibrated. My legs feel used. My hands smell like lemon. My throat is sun-kissed and my eyes are rested. Every time, I say, next time, more time. Every time, I mean it.

The other test I apply when I consider moving anywhere is the bad-day test. If I had a flat tire, a deadline, a headache, could I still make a good day out of it. In Valencia, the answer is always yes. I can walk into the Turia and let the park do the work. I can eat rice and tomatoes and call it dinner without apology. I can go to the market and talk to someone who has been cutting greens since dawn and be reminded that the world is made of hands making useful shapes.

Tomorrow without hesitation

There are cities that dazzle. There are cities that discipline. Valencia does something gentler. It remembers you to yourself. If you are the kind of person who wants to move fast forever, it will let you, but it will also lean in and say, what if you ran and then sat. What if you cooked and then read. What if you bought flowers for no one but your table.

I have explored five continents. I have gotten lost in alleyways and on ridgelines and found myself in unexpected kitchens. I love the world more than is practical. But when I picture the box cutter slicing tape and the key sliding into a new lock, it is Valencia’s key I imagine. A small apartment near the park. A cupboard with jars. A hook by the door for a canvas bag. A running route that starts under a bridge and ends where the ocean begins.

I know what my first day would look like. Early run before the heat. Coffee at a counter where the staff tease in two languages. A produce haul that requires two hands and a restraint I will not practice. An afternoon draft with windows open and the sound of someone practicing trumpet five floors below. A walk at dusk when the lamps flicker and the city turns to honey. Bed with the window cracked and the promise of tomorrow slipping easily under the door.

Not all love has to be noisy to be true. Valencia is a quiet yes. If a plane ticket appeared on my desk right now, I would pack a small bag, tie my shoes, and go.