As regional exceptionalism mounted in various peripheries of the Spanish state during its often-interrupted progress towards centralization and modernization, Valencia, too, was affected. The language spoken there was a variant of Catalan, and there were cultural memories of an independent kingdom of Valencia, founded in 1238 by King James I (Jaume el Conqueridor, to whom a large equestrian statue was erected in 1886-91) and an autonomous Spanish crownland until 1707. As the nineteenth century advanced, a modern regional identity (not inconsistent with Spanish national identity) took shape in Valencia. As the Renaixença gathered steam in Barcelona, Valencian culture-producers participated, notably Teodor Llorente. A cultural association, Lo Rat Penat (“The Bat”, so named after a legendary animal enshrined in the city’s coat of arms), was founded by him and Constantí Llombart in 1878, and the city held its own jocs florals as well as participating in the Barcelona ones. Although Valencian regionalism shared relevant elements of its historical and cultural imaginary with the first wave of Catalanism, it was less strongly focused on its vernacular language.

The first third of the 20th century was a golden age in the strengthening of Valencian regional imaginary. At that time, Valencia, flourishing as a result of the burgeoning citrus trade, enjoyed good relations with the Spanish state and ethnotypically profiled itself as the Mediterranean, urban-debonair side of Spain, alongside Castilian austerity and Andalucian passion. Valencian regional identity became firmly marked with the Regional Exposition of 1909, which also boosted the city’s neo-baroque Art Nouveau architecture (Estació del Nord, 1917). This Valencian regionalism fed into republicanism with for its figurehead the novelist and intellectual Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, a native Valencian and radical republican, who went into exile in 1909.

After 1918, Valencianism was politically articulated for the first time (with a conservative tendency); it remained a marginal political presence until the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Under Franco’s dictatorship, Valencian regionalism experienced a radical change through the work of Joan Fuster (Nosaltres, els valencians, 1962), which provided an ideological break with the former regionalist cultural tradition and sparked a leftist tendency. Since then, Valencian regionalism has split into two major streams: a radical, nationalist and Catalanist one, positioning itself against Spanish nationalism, and a restrained, provincialist one (blaverismo), opposing Catalan nationalism