The Mercado Central covers 8,000 square metres under a roof of iron, glass and ceramic tile — and it still sells fish at seven in the morning, as it has since 1928. Architects Alexandre Soler i March and Francesc Guàrdia i Vial won the commission in 1910; construction ran through the First World War and finished in an era when most European cities were replacing their market halls with warehouses. Valencia did the opposite. It built a cathedral to groceries. The hall sits on Plaza del Mercado, opposite the Llotja de la Seda, the fifteenth-century silk exchange listed by UNESCO in 1996. Two civic buildings, two centuries apart, both about commerce. The market's central dome rises 30 metres above the fish counters. A weathervane shaped like a cotorra — a parrot, and a nod to market gossip — turns above it. Below, roughly 1,000 stalls once traded; today around 300 remain, which is still enough to make it one of the largest fresh-produce markets operating in Europe. This is why a valencia paella cooking class with central market tour begins here rather than in a kitchen. Paella valenciana is a rice dish defined by its ingredients, and those ingredients are regional: bomba or Albufera rice grown in the paddies south of the city, garrofó beans, ferradura green beans, rabbit, chicken, and saffron. Purists note that seafood belongs to paella de marisco, a separate lineage. The market is where that argument is settled daily, stall by stall, in Valencian. The dish itself descends from farm labourers cooking over orange-wood fires beside the Albufera lagoon, ten kilometres south. The wide, shallow pan — the paella, from the Latin patella — gives the rice its thin layer and its socarrat, the caramelised crust at the base that cooks judge by sound. No stirring. No lid. Heat management is the whole technique. Modernista detail runs everywhere through the building: trencadís mosaic, stained glass fruit motifs, a floor plan laid out in irregular polygons to follow the medieval street pattern beneath it. Restoration work through the 2010s cleaned the glazing and reopened light shafts that had been boarded for decades. A valencia paella cooking class with central market tour is therefore two buildings' worth of history compressed into one afternoon — the hall that supplies the pan, and the pan that explains the hall. Valencia Central Market food tours trade on that continuity, and the market hall's own doors open at 07:30 Monday to Saturday, free to enter, closed Sunday.