Restrictions due to the virus outbreak have put Spanish cities in lockdown and resulted in the unprecedented cancellation of Valencia’s Las Fallas festival – but that didn’t stop ARCH scientific partners paying a ‘virtual visit’ to Valencia in late March. Twenty colleagues of the ARCH project, including Las Naves (LNV), met online to discuss how to boost the resilience of La Huerta peri-urban farmland and Albufera national park of Valencia and to demonstrate how they support the city of Valencia in adapting to climate change.

The inspiring virtual visit to the Valencia national park and the peri-urban farmland served to make known the narrative of the city of Valencia in relation to climate change, cultural heritage and the historic areas to the ARCH scientific partners. In return, the “match-making” meeting helped to match the needs and priorities defined by the city with ARCH’s pool of expertise and potential applications, tools and/or models offered by the different partners to help cities protect cultural heritage from the effects of climate change.

Las Naves is willing to design resilience strategies for these two cultural landscapes. However, a good understanding of their value in terms of their heritage significance is needed to better understand the role of these sites in adapting to climate impacts. The online gathering enabled to make clearer how these target sites are linked to the larger urban system of Valencia.

The discussion continued at the ARCH team’s technical session a week later with all the project partners involved in order to validate the project’s expertise/offer to the city of Valencia. The results of this meeting will further support the engagement with local stakeholders to contribute to the city’s Local Work Plan, as well as the scientific partners’ work – as part of the overall commitment of the ARCH team to co-creating results that are relevant and useful to local practitioners.