The 15 Minute City and Spain

And how it is totally joyous

As promised last week after I told you all about the joys of owning an electric car or two, it’s now time to look at another bugbear of the hard of thinking, 15 Minute Cities. Supposedly a recent idea to incarcerate us all in our own Hunger Games style areas, the 15 minute city came into fashion as a wedge issue during and after the Covid lockdown. But what if instead of fearing something so benign as the 15MC you actually came to embrace the idea.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I Give You Spain.

The 15-Minute City: How Barcelona’s Eixample Showed Us the Future of Urban Living in the 1850s

At Valencia Property, we’ve been helping international clients find their perfect homes in Spain for over 25 years, and one question we hear increasingly often is: “Can I really live without a car in a Spanish city?” This question generally comes from our American clients who have just had enough of the car culture of the States. The answer lies in understanding what urban planners call the “15-minute city” – and there’s no better example than Barcelona’s iconic Eixample district. The Guardian newspaper actually wrote about this back in 2016 using the following image from Digital Globe.

What Is a 15-Minute City?

The 15-minute city is a planning concept where everything you need for daily life – groceries, healthcare, schools, parks, cafes, and workplaces – sits within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from your home. It’s not about creating isolated neighbourhoods as each block and area sits next to other 15 minute cities. Barcelona could be called a series of 15 minute cities. The design ensures that each area functions as a complete, self-sufficient community.

But here’s the thing. YOU ARE NOT FECKING BANNED FROM LEAVING IT!

Barcelona’s Eixample: The Original 15-Minute Blueprint

When civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà designed Barcelona’s Eixample in 1859, he was unknowingly creating one of the world’s first 15-minute neighborhoods and Catalan politics and nationalism meant he was given little or no credit for it because he was imposed in place by Madrid (Plus Ca Change) His revolutionary grid system, those distinctive square blocks called “illes”, wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing. Each block was designed with:

• Chamfered corners (those cut-off edges) creating small plazas and improving sightlines (Cars didn’t even exist at the time but he imagined a future due to rail travel where smaller vehicles would predominate. How visionary is that!)

• Interior courtyards providing green space within each block (Ahem, not really done in the end)

• Mixed-use zoning allowing shops on ground floors and residences above (A huge part of the 15 minute city concept)

• Consistent 113-meter block lengths making distances predictable and walkable

Walk through neighbourhoods like Gràcia or Sant Antoni today, and you’ll find bakeries, chemists, schools, markets, and medical centres every few blocks. This wasn’t accidental. Oh no sir, it was designed that way.

Why This Matters for Valencia

While Barcelona gets the headlines, Valencia offers something equally compelling for our international clients, particularly the Americans who now represent nearly 50% of our sales. Valencia’s neighbourhoods like Ruzafa, Ensanche (our own “Eixample”), and even the suburban areas like L’Eliana or it’s scruffy little neighbour, my town of La Pobla De Vallbona (More about that below) have naturally evolved into 15-minute communities.

When we show clients properties in central Valencia, we’re not just selling apartments, we’re offering a lifestyle where your children can walk safely to school, where your morning coffee shop owner knows your name, and where elderly parents can maintain independence without driving. Kids, parents and the elderly living cheek by jowl and exisiting peacefully. They have everything they want to hand… or at least under 15 minutes away.

Let’s Look at My Town

La Pobla has been my home for over a quarter of a century now. It’s not posh, it’s not flashy, it’s not pretentious. In fact as you come into it off the motorway (from which you can get into Valencia in just 15 minutes ;-)) it’s pretty ugly. There are just over 25,000 people in La Pobla (It was 11,000 when I moved here)

You are met on coming into the town by a couple of petrol stations and a tyre replacement service, a betting shop, a couple of estate agents, a butcher, a gym, a bike shop, two window shops, a tile and bathroom accessories shop and some car repair places. So far so bad, but did you notice how many shops were in that description.

Once you get down to the roundabout after 200m you find the Mercadona supermarket, a chicken roasting shop, phone repair place, clothes repair, traditional Valencia dress shop, two cafes, two pizza and kebab places, three barbers and hairdressers, two insurance brokers, a Chinese everything under the sun shop, a take away food place, the dreaded Telepizza, a bathroom shop, a motorbike dealers, a chimney shop, two dentists, one nail bar, another estate agency, a laundrette… you get the idea.

I live a couple of streets back from the Mercadona. Within a fifteen minute walk from my house there are at least ten restaurants, around twenty cafes, four supermarkets and ten to twelve hairdressers, two CBD shops, a haberdashery, a drugstore, eight chemists, three driving schools, a health centre, two private health centres, four gyms, three physios, an osteopath, a huge leisure centre which even includes Parkour and two swimming pools, a pilates centre, two yoga studios, a music school, an art school, a dance school, three insurance sellers, my accountant’s office and a couple of others, a perfume shop, various clothes shops, two shoe shops, a social centre and library, a study centre by the town hall, a small cinema, an old folks social centre with bar of course, various normal schools, a few parks, a market on Monday and a load of orange fields surrounding the town to walk through… My god, there is even a feckin drone shop. Yes! A shop that sells only drones and courses for flying drones!

This town has just 25,000 people remember

Here’s the main point. Every town and village and city in Spain aspires to be a fifteen minute city where everything is to hand. Villages die when the local bar closes down and there are no kids left for the local schools.

There are no conspiracy theories dredged up from the more lunatic fringes of Facebook, no nutters advocating for car rights and wider roads and to be able to have the freedom to live in the middle of nowhere with no facilities. Honestly, if you want to do that you can. And many people do…

but only at the weekends.

Spanish people have their weekend getaways in or outside the village their family came from but they don’t want to actually live there, heaven forbid. Have you ever heard about “La España Vacia” (Empty Spain) If not take a look at this excellent video from James at Spain Unfiltered (Now with over 1 million views) and decide if you could live this type of life. It’s well worth your time to watch this and also to subscribe to James’ channel for more like this.

The Real Estate Advantage

Properties in established 15-minute neighbourhoods typically hold their value better and see stronger rental demand. In fact if you can squeeze that 15 minutes down to 5 then so much the better. Properties like this don’t collapse into a heap of stones like some in the video.

Why do they hold their value more? Because walkability and local amenities are not nice-to-haves, they’re essential criteria for modern buyers, especially those relocating from car-dependent cities in North America or northern Europe where the housing suburbs just go on and on and on for miles and miles, but this is also especially true for the Spanish as convenience is their watchword.

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This is the kind of urban planning that makes Spanish city living not only viable, but genuinely appealing for international families making the move to Spain and the larger cities. And Valencia and the towns surrounding the city have this 15MC concept down to a T. Spain in general does fantastic 15MC. It’s great, it’s the way to live, it’s sociable and it’s not at all dystopian despite what your nutty Auntie says on her social media.

If you are interested in exploring Valencia’s most walkable neighbourhoods contact us. Here at Valencia Property we specialize in helping our international clients find properties that match their lifestyle needs. Get in touch with our team today or just fill in the form you can find at the link here or on the image below.