Platja del Saler

This guide to Platja del Saler outside Valencia opens with a 1960s master plan for fifteen hotels, apartment towers and even an airport, penciled onto the dunes between the city and the sea, with construction that started in 1968 and stalled by 1974. It reaches back further, to salt flats worked here since the twelve hundreds, and forward to an artificial marina basin dug in the 1970s that birds moved into instead of yachts. You'll also hear how this reed and pine landscape shaped Vicente Blasco Ibanez's 1902 novel Canas y Barro, long before anyone thought the marshland worth writing about.