Plaza del Tossal

This guide to Plaza del Tossal in Valencia starts among the cafe tables above ground and asks what lies beneath them: a gate that once guarded the eleventh-century Muslim city and lost its purpose. It follows the wall and its square tower, built of rammed earth, through the Christian conquest that made the defenses obsolete, and the coppersmiths who later gave the district its name. A funeral parlor, a nut seller, and a barber who doubled as the block's bloodletter all opened and closed here across the centuries, none of them knowing what still stood underfoot.