Valencia celebrated 100 years of nostalgia on the 22nd May

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Valencia celebrated 100 years of nostalgia on the 22nd May.

Valencia Government and Town Hall dignitaries remember the Palace of the Exhibition of 1909 here in Valencia.

Both the mayor Rita Barbera and the president Francisco Camps gave speeches in commemoration of that event 100 years ago.  The original exhibition lasted 436 days and was was devoted to the new features of that time: Industry, Agriculture, Commerce and the beautiful arts.  There were scale models, photographic mementoes and products of the time.

The original exhibition was meant to be an ignition of hope for the Valencian people for the 20th century and was initiated by Tomás Trénor from the  Athenian Mercantile institute. And it was his grandson that attended the ceremony yesterday who remembered that it lasted 436 days.

This Palace is one of the few buildings that survived the new grand buildings that rose next to the Turia.

The retinue later paused next to the Marquess of the Turia school, where the students waited on the patio and gave a spontaneous applause for the President and the Mayoress, who entered to salute them to the delight of the Channel 9 cameras. The walkabout of these dignitaries was apparently relaxed after the tense week of judicial declarations by the Gürtel case.  They finished up in the Old Turia gardens where they met up with several hundreds of people to hear the regional hymn, which was written in 1909 for the Exhibition and was interpreted yesterday by 2,009 choristers and musicians. One was María Serrano, daughter of the author of the score.  They performed the interpretation in Castilian first, being the original version, which sounded strange and then many of the assistants ended up singing it again in Valencian. It wasn't necessary to ask which version was liked the most.

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