The Kingdom of Valencia is a narrow strip of rugged territory, roughly half-way down the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and encompassing the modern provinces of Castellón, Valencia and Alicante. The region has a fairly distinctive geographical personality; it consists of a series of small coastal plains ringed by mountains – the Iberian chain to the north, the Sub-Baetic to the south, and between them the foothills of the Castilian plateau. It also, at one time, had a political life of its own – marked by an official birthday in 1238 when Jaime the Conqueror seized the city of Valencia from the Moors, and an official death in 1707 when another, less benign conqueror, Philip V, abolished its autonomy after it had backed the wrong candidate in a disputed succession to the Spanish throne. These 500 years of independence have left the Valencians with a split personality and with the problem of coming to terms with their own history. Are they a nation as their political past would suggest, or a part of a greater Catalonia as the language (at least of the coastal zone) and the culture would imply, or just an extension of Castile to which their economy has always been tightly linked (Valencia is, after all, the nearest seaport by rail from Madrid)?

Invertebrate Spain has been a medley of autonomous and conflicting cultures – Jewish, Moorish, Catalan and Basque – and the relationship between centre and periphery is one of the enduring problems of Spanish history.