Getting to Valencia: airport to city centre, trains, coaches and driving, and what is still unpublished

If you are coming from the UK, Ireland or further afield, you will almost certainly fly in, and the first question is how to get out of the airport. That part is well documented, and we give it with price, journey time and last service. The rest (long-distance trains, coaches, driving) is less well documented than it looks, and we say so where it matters.

One warning first: in March, during the Fallas, the city runs on a different system. The metro closes central stations around midday, the centre is shut to traffic and the EMT city buses run 24 hours. If you are coming then, read that section before choosing how to travel.

How do you get from the airport to the city centre?

Valencia airport, at Manises, has three public options into the centre, plus taxis. The table shows what the sources publish; where they disagree, the row says so.

The metro is the sensible choice for almost everyone: fast, easy to follow and it drops you in the centre. The €4.80 fare is the three-zone single ticket including the airport supplement; add the cost of the rechargeable card, €1.10 to €2.20, if you don't have one. Fares for the rest of the network are in getting around Valencia by metro, bus and tram.

Bus 150 is the cheapest and the least reliable. Four sources give three different prices and three different frequencies, and none of them is the operator's official timetable. A taxi is the answer for a late arrival with luggage: €20 to €25 shared between four people works out at the price of the metro.

By train: two stations ten minutes apart

High-speed trains arrive at Joaquín Sorolla station; local and regional trains at the Estación del Norte, the modernist building in the centre. The Estación del Norte is a 5 to 8 minute walk from Plaza del Ayuntamiento, the town hall square, according to the one-day itineraries we consulted.

If you fly into Madrid or Barcelona and continue by train, this is where our sources stop. They give no long-distance fares by booking window, no frequencies by origin and no door-to-door times from other cities. It is a genuine gap in the documentation, and we would rather flag it than fill it with figures from memory.

One detail that does matter in March: access to the station is restricted from 13:00 to 15:00, 13 to 19 March because of the mascletàs, the daily firecracker displays, according to Valencia Bonita's 2026 Fallas guide. A train arriving at 14:00 during Fallas week leaves you in an area closed off for safety.

By long-distance coach

Our sources confirm that intercity coaches stop in the city, but they offer neither a list of operators nor a price range by origin. So we don't publish one.

Is it worth coming by car?

Outside March, it depends on where you are staying, whether you drive down or hire a car. An EMT car park costs €21.80 a day at the hourly rate (2025 tariff), and the blue zone in the centre €1.00 an hour, with a two-hour maximum. Three days with a car parked in the centre cost more than the price difference between a hotel with parking and one without.

In March, no. The blue zone is suspended from 9:00 on 9 March to 9:00 on 20 March, the orange zone becomes residents-only around the clock and the centre is closed to private traffic from around 15:00 on 16 March to around 4:00 on 20 March, according to the city council's 2026 notices. The alternative is the park-and-ride car parks at metro stations.

All of this is covered in detail in parking in Valencia: ORA fares, car parks and the low-emission zone and in Valencia's park-and-ride car parks, including the free spaces Metrovalencia opens during Fallas.

What changes during Fallas?

For 2026, the EMT announced a continuous 24-hour service on the main days, with around 3 million seats offered across the whole operation. Metrovalencia runs an almost continuous service, but closes central stations from roughly 12:30 to 14:30 around each mascletà, and in 2026 the specialist press warned of possible disruption due to industrial disputes.

What no source documents: an official Fallas surcharge on public transport. What every source documents: the indirect surcharge. Longer taxi rides because of road closures, hotels jumping from €60 to €100 to €250 to €500 on the nights of 17 to 19 March, and a city that splits into poorly connected zones.

What this means when you arrive: choose your accommodation by its metro station rather than by neighbourhood, and book it before your flight. A flight can be bought in January; a room near a station that stays open needs booking in the autumn.

Outside March the logic is the opposite: any hotel in the centre is twenty minutes from the airport by metro, and price decides.

What is unpublished or contradictory?

• Bus 150 fare: €1.45, €1.50 or €2.50 depending on the source. No official timetable in the material we used.
• Bus 150 frequency: every 23 to 30, 26 or 35 minutes, depending on who you ask.
• Last metro from the airport: not consistently published by any of the sources consulted.
• Train and air fares by booking window: no consolidated series for Valencia.
• Operators that have stopped running: no reliable inventory.

When any of those figures appears from an official source, it will go into this page's data table. Until then, the range is the information, not a figure picked at random from within it. For the network map and where to download it, see the Valencia transport map.

Sources

Visit Valencia, airport page. City Rails, Valencia metro map, 2026. Airport2City, Airport Transfer Portal and Valencia Trip, 2026, for journey times and prices from the airport. Valencia City Guide for the bus 150 timetable. Metrovalencia, 2025 fares, and EMT València, 2025 fares, via this site's core pages.

Valencia Secreta, 2026, for the EMT's Fallas operation. Adept Travel, March 2026, for Metrovalencia disruption. Valencia Bonita, 2026 Fallas guide, for the station access restriction. Ajuntament de València, notices on the ORA and parking zones during Fallas 2026.