L’Horta of Valencia County is located in a metropolitan territory developed, mostly, at the expense of old cultivated areas of vegetables and fruits and the agrarian belt that wrapped the city many centuries ago.

According to the geographer Roland Courtot, since the 1950’s, the creation of this area is subject to three logics well identified by the urban geography:

• the general model of the radiocentric city
• the regional model of the doublet city/port
• and finally, the model of the peri-urban irrigated area/ horta, where the rural towns have developed around the lines of radial communication of the city.

This logic allows understanding the enclave condition that currently a great part of the cultivated land of l’Horta suffers.

The rank growth and the urban policies have given as a result, due to the spatial competence between city and Horta, the progressive disappearance of the last one.

The logic of the radioconcentric model shows how l'Horta have resulted chopped and clamped in the resulting middle grounds:

• of the circular growth of the city that, besides, has promoted the urbanization of all the horticultural space that separated the seaside towns from the city of Valencia,
• of the growth shaped like a halo of the towns from l’Horta.

This structural growth was reinforced by a circumstantial event such as:

• the “Plan Sur”, meant to avoid another catastrophic flood like the one in 1957. This plan drew a new impassable frontier to Horta both sides of the new river course of the Turia, and ecologically isolated the southern Hortes from the rest.

The irrigated areas/horta spaces that own the necessary critical mass to conserve themselves can be found, especially, at the North of the city of Valencia and at the South of l’Horta Nord, and only a municipal, county and economic policy (PAT of the l’Horta) voluntarist, sustained by as strong citizen consensus, can preserve all that remains of l'Horta despite the spatial logics that are typical of an economic and financial system in which we live.

Map of land use in Horta de València in 2009 (according to SIOSE). We have distinguished four main uses: continuous urban fabric (compact building with apartments); discontinuous urban fabric (extensive construction with urbanizations); industrial and commercial land; and vegetable gardens. The district of l'Horta reached in 2009 33,250 hectares of artificial land and 7,000 hectares of vegetable gardens.