Two Renaissance popes were born in this Valencian hill town, whose double-walled castle still glares down at the orchards that made it rich.
Nobody I mentioned Xàtiva to before going had heard of it, which is baffling once you’re standing under its castle — actually two castles joined by a long defensive wall running along a jagged ridge, Castell Menor and Castell Major, guarding a pass that has mattered strategically since Iberian times. The Romans held it, the Moors expanded it, and under Al-Andalus rule Xàtiva became one of the first places in Europe to produce paper, using the same techniques that had traveled the Silk Road from China. That’s not a footnote I expected to find in a small Valencian town, but the paper mills along the Albaida valley made Xàtiva genuinely important for centuries, exporting to courts across Christian Europe long before Fabriano or any Italian city claimed the craft.
Borgias and a Burned Town
Xàtiva’s other claim to fame is blunter: it’s the birthplace of Rodrigo Borgia — Pope Alexander VI — and possibly of his uncle Alfons de Borja, Pope Callixtus III, depending on which local historian you ask. The Borgia connection is everywhere here, quietly, in a way that feels less like marketing and more like a family the town never fully got over. Then there’s the darker chapter: in 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Xàtiva backed the losing side and the victorious Philip V had the town burned to the ground as punishment, ordering it renamed “San Felipe.” A portrait of the king hangs in the local museum, hung upside down — a small, stubborn act of civic memory that nobody has bothered to correct in three centuries.
Orchards, Fountains, and the Walk Up
The town itself sits below the castle in a tangle of narrow streets, Gothic churches, and Renaissance mansions with carved stone doorways that tell you this was once a wealthy place. What struck me most, though, was how green everything felt on the walk up — Xàtiva sits in the middle of the Costera comarca, ringed by orchards of persimmon, a fruit the Valencian region has more or less made its own in recent decades, and in autumn the trees along the approach roads hang heavy with that impossible orange. I stopped at the Font dels Trenta-dos Xorros, a fountain with thirty-two spouts said to represent the town’s medieval neighborhoods, and refilled my bottle with water that actually tasted like something, cold and faintly mineral, the way fountain water in these hill towns usually does and almost never does anywhere else.
The climb to the castle itself takes the better part of an hour if you go slowly, which you should, because the views back over the Albaida valley — terraced hills, the town’s terracotta roofs, the Serra Grossa beyond — are the kind that make you stop every switchback whether you’re tired or not.
When to go: October and November bring the persimmon harvest and cooler walking weather for the castle climb; April and May offer mild temperatures and greener hillsides.