Sep 24, 2026
An exhibition on the Ruta Valenciana is opening in Alicante, a culture of clubs, music, cars, drugs and endless nights which, in the 1980s and 1990s, became a symbol of freedom for an entire generation. For some, it was the best time of their youth. For others, it was a dangerous era associated with accidents and deaths. More than thirty years on, the Ruta is coming to the museum.
First came the music
Before it became a tale of excess, controversy and accidents, the Ruta Valenciana was, above all, about music.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, clubs began to spring up around Valencia that bore little resemblance to traditional nightclubs. Barraca was already in existence before the great boom of the Ruta. In 1984, Spook Factory opened, and little by little other venues began to form a sort of nightlife map along the El Saler road.
Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, Renegade Soundwave, Underworld and many other bands were playing there โ bands that were hardly ever the main attraction on the commercial dance floors.
The Valencian DJs mixed post-punk, new beat, industrial, electronic, techno, EBM, house and sounds from other parts of Europe. Fran Lenaers, at Spook Factory, and Josรฉ Conca, at Chocolate, became key figures in that new musical culture.
It wasnโt just about going out dancing. It was about discovering music that, in many cases, was still unknown to the Spanish public.
The night that could last until Monday
The clubs were relatively close to one another, spread out over a distance of about 30 kilometres. This made something possible that seems hard to imagine today: a night out could start in one venue, continue in another and end in a third, without anyone being in too much of a hurry to get home.
Over time, the sessions became longer and longer. La Ruta eventually evolved into a culture of sleepless nights and constant hopping between nightclubs.
The famous concept of the โ72 hoursโย precisely encapsulates that idea of partying taken to the extreme. It doesnโt mean that everyone spent three days on the go partying, but it does represent the most extreme image of that era.
Young people from other parts of Spain would flock to the nightclubs in Valencia. Some venues could attract thousands of people in a single night.
For many of them, that road became a sort of territory of their own: new music, cars, friends, freedom and the feeling that the usual rules were left at the clubโs door.
Drugs and the price of freedom
But the history of the Route also has a much darker side.
In the early 1990s, drug use began to play an increasingly prominent role in that nightlife scene. And those long nights out were linked to travelling by car between different venues.
The Directorate-General for Traffic began to treat the phenomenon as a road safety issue as well.
Between January and August 1992, 72 accidents were recorded on the VP-1041 road. Young people were involved in 38 of them. There were 10 fatalities, six of whom were under 25, and 123 people were injured, 74 of whom were young people.
These figures illustrate the scale of the problem, but an important point must be made: this data does not allow us to attribute all these deaths directly to drugs or to La Ruta.
During those years, police checks and operations targeting drug use and trafficking also increased. La Ruta was no longer just about music and leisure and was beginning to feature more and more prominently in the news.
How *La Ruta* became a television phenomenon
By the early 1990s, the Route had become too big to be ignored by the media.
Television began to turn it into one of the major youth phenomena of the time. Images of cars, packed nightclubs, exhausted young people and drugs helped to create an increasingly negative image.
The press reported on accidents, substance abuse and violence. Subsequent research into that period has also highlighted how the media oversimplified a far more complex phenomenon.
Because behind the โRuta del Bakalaoโ label lay many different things: a very distinctive music scene, a new generation of DJs, innovative clubs, thousands of young people seeking spaces of freedom and, at the same time, real problems relating to drugs and road safety.
Both things could exist at the same time.
Thirty years later
Nowadays, when people talk about the Route, many of them think of the music first.
Those who lived through that era talk about post-punk, new beat, industrial, techno, EBM, house, Madchester and hardcore. They also recall the DJing style of the Valencian DJs, who developed their own scene that was connected to what was happening elsewhere in Europe.
In 2026, more than thirty years later, that culture is once again the subject of research and also of remembrance.
Not simply to turn it into a story of excess, but neither to gloss over the most problematic aspects of that era.
A Night at the Museum
And perhaps that is the most curious thing of all.
A culture that originated in clubs, on the roads, in car parks and on dance floors has now ended up in a museum.
On 26 September, Alicante opens Sube โ Memories, Celebration and the Valencian Route, an exhibition dedicated to bringing that era back to life through music, images, places and the memories of those who lived through it.
More than thirty years after La Ruta disappeared from Valenciaโs nightlife, it returns to a place where nobody has to dance anymore.
To the museum.
Exhibition:ย Sube โ Memories, celebrations and the Valencian Route
Venue:ย Las Cigarreras Cultural Centre
Address:ย C/ San Carlos, 78, 03013 Alicante
Dates:ย from 26 September 2026 to 23 January 2027
Opening hours:ย Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00โ21.30.
Opening: 26 September, at 12.30 pm