10/10/2026
WHY IS VALENCIA FULL OF ORANGE TREES IF YOU CAN’T EAT THE ORANGES?
Over the coming weeks, one of Valencia’s most familiar seasonal changes will begin to happen. The oranges hanging from thousands of trees across the city will slowly turn from green to bright orange, adding splashes of colour to streets, avenues and squares just as the weather begins to cool.
It is one of the first things many visitors notice about Valencia. Orange trees seem to be everywhere, lining roads, filling plazas and decorating the city through the winter months. Then somebody eventually asks the obvious question: if Valencia is famous for oranges, why is nobody walking around picking them from the trees?
The answer is that the oranges growing along Valencia’s streets are generally not the same sweet varieties that you buy in the market. Most are ornamental orange trees, often bitter orange, planted because they are hardy, attractive and particularly well suited to the city. They remain green throughout the year, produce beautifully scented white blossom in spring and then cover themselves with bright fruit during the colder months, making them almost perfectly suited to the Mediterranean streetscape.
There is also a much deeper connection between Valencia and the orange tree. Citrus fruits arrived in the Iberian Peninsula centuries ago, with bitter oranges among the varieties cultivated during the Islamic period, but Valencia’s enormous commercial orange industry developed much later. By the late 18th century, growers around places such as Carcaixent were beginning to cultivate oranges commercially, and during the 19th century improved irrigation, transport and access to European markets transformed the landscape. Vast areas between Castellón and La Safor became covered with orange groves, and the fruit became one of the great symbols of Valencia.
For decades, the orange appeared in paintings, travel posters, advertising and photographs of the region. Valencian oranges were exported across Europe in huge quantities, helping to cement the association between the city and the fruit. The trees growing beside city traffic, however, have a very different purpose. They are there primarily to provide greenery, shade, blossom and colour rather than food.
And there are a lot of them. Earlier this year, Valencia City Council removed fruit from 8,789 ornamental orange trees growing along the city’s streets, collecting an extraordinary 340,508 kilos of oranges. That is more than 340 tonnes of fruit growing right in the middle of Valencia.
So why not simply eat them? The most obvious reason is taste. Many of these street oranges are extremely bitter, and biting into one expecting the sweet Valencian orange you know from a fruit shop would probably come as a fairly unpleasant surprise. More importantly, the fruit from ornamental street trees is not grown or maintained as a food crop. These trees sit beside roads, pavements, traffic and pollution, and the fruit is not monitored or harvested under the same conditions as oranges grown commercially for consumption.
That does not mean the oranges are poisonous or dangerous to touch. It simply means that fruit growing beside a busy urban road is not treated in the same way as fruit grown on an agricultural estate and intended for sale. There is also the practical problem of what happens when hundreds of thousands of oranges eventually fall from the trees. A crushed orange on a pavement is messy enough; several thousand of them can create slippery pavements, dirty streets and a considerable amount of work for the city.
That is why the fruit is collected every year. Some of it is gathered by hand, while in other areas machinery is used to gently vibrate the trees so the oranges fall and can be removed more efficiently. The fruit is not simply thrown away either. In 2026, the oranges collected from Valencia’s streets were sent for treatment and turned into compost, meaning that more than 340 tonnes of unwanted fruit were returned to the agricultural cycle rather than ending up as waste.
There is something quite fitting about that. The trees are not producing oranges for our breakfast tables, but they are still contributing something back. They also create one of Valencia’s most distinctive visual contradictions: you can walk beneath trees absolutely loaded with beautiful ripe oranges while everybody passes underneath them without giving the fruit a second glance.
For visitors, that can look completely baffling. For Valencians, it is simply part of the city. The orange tree has become so closely associated with Valencia that it is easy to forget there are really two different stories here: the agricultural story of the sweet Valencian orange, grown in orchards outside the city and exported around the world, and the ornamental orange tree, quietly decorating Valencia’s streets with green leaves, fragrant blossom and thousands upon thousands of bitter oranges.
So over the next few weeks, as those green fruits begin turning orange across the city, take a closer look. They may look tempting, but they are there to brighten Valencia’s streets rather than fill your fruit bowl.
Photo by: Paul Streets of Valencia
