What you can see on the Port Saplaya webcam
It is a moving camera: through the day it switches between a few set views, all of them over the sand and the sea. The harbour and the coloured houses around it stay out of the frame, so this is a beach camera, the one to check for the state of the sea, the wind on the water and how busy the sand is.
Alboraia beach by Port Saplaya
A little further north, near the marina village of Port Saplaya, a second tourist-board camera watches the beach of Alboraia. It also moves between positions. Early on it looks east into the sunrise, past a long rock groyne that runs out from the sand; later it turns south-east, and on clear days the container cranes of the Port of Valencia line the horizon on the right.
This is the more open, less built-up end of Valencia's city beaches, and the one that local surfers and bodyboarders watch on days with a swell from the east: you can often pick out boards in the water and see sets breaking over the sandbanks. On calm summer mornings, by contrast, the sea lies almost flat and the sand is close to empty.
Little Venice: a village built round a marina
Port Saplaya, Port Saplatja in Valencian, began as a holiday development in the 1970s, and its first residents were registered in 1975. Its houses stand shoulder to shoulder all the way round the basin, their fronts in warm colours, with the boats moored almost at the front doors: that is the picture behind the nickname. What started as a place of second homes is now where many of its 2,100 or so registered residents live all year, though the village still fills up each summer. The marina is busy in every season, with a large fleet of catamarans, and dinghy sailing is taught beside the basin all year round.
The dry river and the two beaches
The harbour mouth splits the shore into two beaches of golden sand, north and south of the entrance, together roughly two-thirds of a mile (1 km) long. Some 500 metres further south, the Barranc del Carraixet reaches the sea after a course of about 31 miles (50 km) from the Sierra Calderona. Its bed is dry for most of the year, and James I of Aragon called it the riu Sec, the "dry river", in his 13th-century chronicle; after heavy rain, though, it can carry dangerous floods. Beyond its mouth the sand runs on south through Patacona to the city beaches of Valencia.
When to watch Port Saplaya
Spain is one hour ahead of the UK and Ireland, so a view taken at 9 in the morning here is 8 o'clock in London or Dublin. The camera starts the day facing the sunrise, when the sea can turn to glare; the later views, angled to the south-east, have the sun to the side and then behind them, and show the colour of the water better. In summer it is a quick way to see how crowded the beach is before you set out.
Getting to Port Saplaya
The village lies about 1¼ miles (2 km) from the centre of Alboraia and some 4 miles (6.5 km) north-east of Valencia's City Hall, beside the V-21 motorway into the city. Metropolitan buses come out from Valencia, and Alboraia's own town bus links Port Saplaya with Patacona and the old centre. The Valencia webcams keep watch on the promenade at Patacona, a little further south, and on the City Hall square in the heart of the city.
