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Valencian Party Pitcher · Cava Cocktail

Agua de Valencia

Agua de Valencia — street food from Comunidad Valenciana, Spain
Photo: James West / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

The name is a joke: legend has it a bartender invented the drink on the spot in the late 1950s after tourists, tired of ordering the bar's 'Agua de Bilbao' sparkling wine, dared him to make them something new — so he named his improvised cocktail after the city instead.

Agua de Valencia blends fresh-squeezed orange juice with cava, gin, and vodka, served ice-cold in a large shared pitcher and poured into flutes. It's sweet, citrusy, and fizzy, and drunk in rounds among friends rather than sipped solo.

Why it's made this way: It was created at the Café Madrid in the city of Valencia and takes its name and its orange juice straight from the region's famous citrus groves, making it a genuinely Valencian invention rather than a generic Spanish cocktail.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.