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On a boiling hot day in Valencia last August, I jumped in a car with a colleague and two locals and headed south, out of the city, towards the beach. We took the only road available, the CV-500, a coastal motorway commonly known as Carretera El Saler. In the haze of the midday sun we passed palm trees, tatty hotels and rows of empty greenhouses, usually home to melons, pumpkins and tomatoes. To our right was Parque Natural de la Albufera, a freshwater lagoon rich with birdlife, and on our left was Playa Perelló, a beach popular with surfers, tourists and city workers on a lazy lunch break.

This might have all felt entirely ordinary were it not for the many clubs and bars dotted about in various states of disrepair, relics of a once-bustling nightlife industry. From the late-'70s until the mid-'90s, Carretera El Saler was the main artery of a rich music scene that solidified around dozens of clubs, pubs and gig venues, many of them huge, in and around Valencia.

This scene would one day become known as La Ruta (or La Ruta del Bakalao / La Ruta Destroy) because ravers would spend all weekend bouncing from club to club on a set route. ("Ruta" is "route" in Spanish.) But this name didn't take hold until the late-'80s. According to Joan M. Oleaque, whose excellent book En Éxtasis is essential reading on the topic, before that everyone simply referred to going out as "la fiesta"—"the party." (For simplicity's sake, I'm going to use the name La Ruta throughout.)

At the peak of La Ruta, tens of thousands of ravers travelled from the city and its many surrounding towns and villages to party at venues like Barraca, Chocolate, Spook Factory and Puzzle (pronounced "Pooz-leh"). Some, including famous artists, fashion designers and filmmakers, came from even further afield—Madrid, Barcelona, France, the UK. All for a taste of one of the earliest and most cutting-edge dance music scenes in the world.

"Valencia has always been a very important point of reference musically," Luís Bonias, a second-generation La Ruta DJ, told me over a drink in the grand lobby of a hotel not far from the city centre. "Without Valencia, Spain would've had nothing, it would've taken a lot longer to get everything going. It was difficult for a scene like this to take off in Barcelona or Madrid because [the area around Valencia] was secluded. There was something magical and special, which started with 3, 4, 500 people and later reached the global stage. The same thing happened in Manchester with The Haçienda."

Perhaps this all comes as a surprise. La Ruta is familiar, at least nominally, in Spain, and has been the subject of several books, documentaries and articles in leading national broadsheets such as El Pais and El Mundo. But in the English-speaking world, few people have heard of it. Aside from brief pieces in Electronic Beats, The Ransom Note and ITHAKA Festival's blog, I couldn't find any journalism online in English, which is curious considering how integral UK and US music was to La Ruta. Ibiza, a Spanish scene with a comparable early history, is famous the world over, so why not Valencia? How can such a large and influential musical movement have faded from history?

"I think it's unbelievable that the Valencian scene doesn't get a mention in Energy Flash," said Luis Costa, who in 2016 published an exhaustive oral history on La Ruta called ¡Bacalao!.

Part of the reason for its omission lay at the first stop on our car journey. We pulled into a dusty lot next to a squat brown building, its paint peeling and covered in graffiti. This was Chocolate, a former rice-drying plant that, at its peak in the '80s, was one of the most fiercely cutting-edge clubs in the world. Today, following a series of closures and changes of ownership, it's a shadow of its former self, hosting sporadic anniversary parties and nostalgic events with names like "Back In Time" and "That Night In '98."

A little further up the road, by a small roundabout where Carretera El Saler splits in two, sat Barraca, the first and arguably most famous of the La Ruta clubs. It takes its name from a cottage-style building typical of Valencia, which, when the club opened in 1965, is all it was. Gleaming white with a large silver sign at the entrance, it's currently in a better state than Chocolate—popular touring DJs such as DVS1 and Charlotte de Witte have played in 2019—but it still only opens occasionally. La Ruta is now a distant memory.

"Right now, Valencia is shit," the legendary former Chocolate DJ and promoter Toni "El Gitano" Vidal told me at a busy tapas spot in the city. "We were once considered pioneers when it came to music, but now there's nothing."

Chocolate, Barraca

The party landscape was even more barren in the mid-to-late-'70s, when the first seeds of La Ruta took root. The death in 1975 of Spain's infamous dictator, Francisco Franco, lifted a weight off the country's shoulders socially and politically, but in terms of nightlife and pop culture it was still early days. Most pubs and clubs played a safe mix of disco, funk and Top 40 hits. The DJ, or pinchadiscos, was just another member of staff, and dance floors were typically spaces where men "stood at the bar watching women shaking their hips," wrote Oleaque in En Éxtasis. When the men were done ogling, they would often approach the dance floor and do "what they knew best: start fighting."

But a new kind of audience was growing. Young 20-somethings who, buoyed by their country's transition to democracy, were seeking out the most modern trends in music and fashion. "For the first time, there was a generation of young people who go out to truly have fun, and who do so freely," said Costa.

"It was an important moment for the youth," said the revered Spanish designer Francis Montesinos in the documentary 72h… Y Valencia Fue La Ciudad. As well as designing interiors for clubs like Distrito 10, he was a regular on the La Ruta circuit. "It was a moment of change, a moment of very different attitudes, social attitudes, all types of attitudes."

Valencia was also the ideal location for a fresh alternative movement, thanks to a perfect storm of history, geography and circumstance. It was the right size, bustling enough not to feel claustrophobic, but small enough to incubate a scene. Unlike Madrid and Barcelona, it was out of the spotlight, and therefore unaffected by the major social, cultural and economic pressures of international cities. Tourism in the area, especially during the long summer months, was booming. Plus, as I was repeatedly told, Valencianos have a strong musical tradition.

"In Valencia, there are lots of bands," said the DJ and journalist Antonio Hal. "At the summer festivals, the Moorish and Christian festivals, there are lots of people playing. My grandfather was a composer of pasodoble. All my cousins play instruments. There's a strong relationship with music since time immemorial. So yes, I think this attitude towards music was already in our genes."

Juan Santamaría

But as ideal as conditions were, every scene needs a pioneer, someone to break the mould and open people's eyes to a new way of doing things. Juan Santamaría, who died aged 70 in April, was born in Valencia in 1949. He spent most of the '70s hopping around Spain and Europe, working in hotels, experimenting with drugs and, when the opportunity arose, DJing. He cut his teeth at Cap 3000 in Benidorm, playing to thousands every night from a booth built in the style of a helicopter cabin.

In 1977, while on a short trip back to Valencia, Santamaría ended up DJing at Barraca after the usual resident got held up in Seville. He didn't know most of the records—in those days, clubs kept their own record collections—and there was no pre-cue function on the mixer. But there was a microphone. Every time he played a track, he asked the crowd what they thought. If it was a no, he flipped the vinyl and tried another. By the end, the club was rocking.

"The difference between my generation of DJs and the one before lay in our fundamental training," said Santamaría in En Éxtasis. "We were curious people and we wanted the music to generate the same curiosity in other people. We wanted to provoke affection from the crowd. And there's also another difference, which is that money didn't matter at all to us."

"While Santamaría came a little bit from the old school, he laid the groundwork for this transgression and revolution, playing very different things," said Costa. "He's the absolute pioneer, though he only DJ'ed, never organised. He's a god in Valencia."

Pictured right: Juan Santamaría

Santamaria was only at Barraca for one weekend before the club closed for a period after Easter. But during that time, Carlos Simó, another lynchpin in the La Ruta story, saw him play and was astounded. Having already been a punter and a waiter at the club, Simó graduated to the decks when Santamaría left. By 1980, he was resident, a position he kept until 1986. In that time, he arguably did more to shape the scene than any other DJ.

Simó gradually phased out the dance music of the time (funk, soul, disco, flamenco) and replaced it with fresher sounds, from pop and rock & roll to punk, post-punk and new wave. He championed acts like Ian Drury, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits, Sex Pistols and Nina Hagen. Later, he wove in krautrock and early electronic bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. He pioneered an eclectic style of DJing years before the term "Balearic" would be coined to describe Alfredo's sets of reggae, soul and pop at Amnesia in Ibiza.

"I didn't play for everybody, it was something special," said Simó when I met him at a grotty café in Valencia. He's now in his 60s, and in 2011 he suffered a serious heart attack. But he still has one of those faces that loses 20 years with a smile.

"Lots of people from all different classes came to Barraca and they told me that they danced to everything I played, because they knew it was good," he said. "I wasn't a jukebox, the public knew that they were here to listen to different music."

Between DJing and studying architecture, Simó worked hard to track down the latest imports. He travelled to the UK and the US. In Valencia, before Santamaría and Miguel Jiménez set up the Zic Zac record shop in 1983, he was a regular at Vda. Miguel Roca, a large department store that also sold TVs, lamps and radios. He would spend hours inside, listening to every record available. When he became better known, he sent his sister to collect records in his place, to stop other people jumping him at the store and copying his selections.

"I thought people needed to work harder for them," he said.

Simó was a rebellious DJ. Every week from the booth at Barraca, he performed "la matada" ("the killing"), a ritual that involved snapping a vinyl in half simply because it had reached number one. (Soft Cell's "Tainted Love," among others, met this fate.) The crowd was often taken aback.

"'But what are you doing? You're crazy!' they would say," Simó told Costa in ¡Bacalao!. "They'd try and approach me, but there was a bar in the way. 'Don't kill it! Don't kill it!"

Carlos Simo

Carlos Simó

Because Barraca was in Sueca, a town roughly 40 minutes south of Valencia, it attracted ravers from the many nearby towns and villages—young, lost souls who found their identity on its dance floor. Every weekend, mods, punks, rockers and other urban tribes mingled beneath its spotlights. Simó played music for them all. Laws left over from the Franco era meant there were no sound restrictions.

"The only rule was that the nearest residence had to be 500 metres away," said Simó. "Then you could get a license to stay open until midday."

By 1981, Barraca was the beating heart of a burgeoning party scene, made up of numerous pubs and clubs in Valencia and its surroundings. Talented young DJs such as Quique Serrano and Juanito "Torpedo" were playing challenging guitar music in cool spots like Galaxy and Gigoló. Dance floors were full, often with as many as 600 people. It was unlike anything else happening in Spain.

Meanwhile, in other bars and venues in the city, a parallel live music movement was brewing known as Movida Valenciana, partly inspired by the music of La Movida in Madrid, which itself borrowed from British new wave and Neue Deutsche Welle in Germany. In Valencia, the emergence of bands dovetailed with the club scene's newfound love of guitar music. Concerts sprang up overnight. In May 1981, Soft Cell played to several hundred people in a club called Éxtasis in Llombay, a village of fewer than 3000 people.

"To speak about Valencia at the start of the '80s is to speak about a place where lots of stuff was happening, and in a very fun and crazy way," Ana Curra, who played in a handful of bands at the time, said in ¡Bacalao!. "I've always thought that Valencians were a bit nuts, very rowdy and big lovers of music. During those years, you could already hear music as good as any in London or Madrid."

Ana Curra

"All this is brought on by the change of government to [Spain's socialist party] PSOE, which lent more importance to culture," said Costa. "This propelled the avant-garde movement forward in Valencia."

Two figures in particular ran with the idea of hosting bands in nightclubs. The first was Simó, who every so often brought Spanish acts like Glamour, Comité Cisne and the popular Zaragoza outfit Radio Futura to Barraca. They would play at 1 AM to give fans time to drive to the venue, with Simó DJing before and after.

The second, and most prolific, was Toni "El Gitano" Vidal, a local DJ, promoter and rock music fanatic who told me he considers himself the reincarnation of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. (He also has Peter Hook's signature tattooed on his arm.) Throughout the '80s, he claims to have promoted 352 concerts in and around Valencia, including international acts like Soft Cell, Thompson Twins and Alphaville. Many of these took place at Chocolate, where Vidal was a resident between 1983 and 1986.

Opened in the summer of 1980, Chocolate was originally called Chocolate Cream—its facade resembled a chocolate cake with cream running from it. Juan Santamaría was the first resident, but the club struggled with its identity and the early years were a mess. When Vidal came on the scene, the owner, Artemio Guardiola, was so desperate for someone to rescue it he practically gave him free reign.

"At that point, the club was destroyed, there weren't even any lights in the car park," said Vidal. "I proposed to the owner to create some different, anti-everything. We began with a destroyed club and I played the strangest music you could imagine: Sisters Of Mercy, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle. All different types of bands, whatever I fucking felt like."

The first concert Vidal promoted as resident featured the UK rock band Killing Joke, who were massive in Valencia at the time. He paid them £1000 and drove them down from Barcelona in his car. The show transformed Chocolate's fortunes.

"I decided not to do any kind of promo, not on the radio, not on the street, nothing," said Vidal. "I didn't want anyone to know. Normally at Chocolate, there was no one there at around midnight, only some people who came from Barraca, but very few. At that point, we didn't have much of a crowd. Killing Joke played at 2 AM on Saturday night. Slowly, people started turning up, and when they arrived, they were shocked to find the band playing. As soon as the club was full, they stopped. People were furious because they'd missed most of the gig. They started spitting and throwing glasses. They wanted to kill me because they'd missed their favourite band and I hadn't told them about it. I made it very clear then and there that the point I was trying to get across was that, from this point onwards, I was going to do whatever I liked."

Pictured centre: Toni "El Gitano" Vidal

This canny PR stunt worked, and within weeks Chocolate was rammed. To meet demand, bands performed twice, once at 2 AM and again at 7 AM. Vidal DJ'd in the gaps, playing the darkest and most twisted music he could get his hands on, from Psychic TV and The Cramps to Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. Alien Sex Theme's "Ignore The Machine" was a Chocolate anthem. The principal aim was to shock. This approach spawned a dedicated following made up of all sorts of weird and sinister characters. In ¡Bacalao!, Vidal refers to the club during this period as a "sect."

Everyone agrees that the '80s was a golden era in Valencia's musical history. The clubs were full, the music was great and the restrictions were few. Parties ran all night and sometimes all day. By 1986, as well as Barraca and Chocolate, there was Espiral, Spook Factory, ACTV, Puzzle, Distrito 10 and Pacha Auditorium, which later became Arena Auditorium. Zic Zac, the city's best record shop, was doing a roaring trade. But there was something else, too, a secret ingredient fuelling the good times: mescalina.

The drug, a precursor to ecstasy called MDA, appeared as quickly as it vanished. (Its name is misleading, too—it had nothing to do with cacti.) Vidal, by all accounts a big fan, claims to have seen them in circulation as early as 1981, though the more widely accepted lifespan runs roughly from 1982 through 1986. Rumour has it that one day the police busted a key chemical component, and that was that.

Taken orally as capsules, mescalina's effects were similar to the ecstasy of today: dilated pupils, increased energy and strong feelings of love and empathy with those around you. They also went wonderfully with music.

"Mescalina opened your hearing," said Luís Bonias. "They created a vibe of total joy, and people were very open to all kinds of music. The DJs, making the most of this happiness, could take more risks and play weirder tracks."

Distrito 10

A second generation of DJs, trained on the loved-up dance floors of the mid-'80s, started to emerge, selectors like Bonias, Jose Conca and David "El Niño." In 1986, Simó and Vidal left Barraca and Chocolate respectively—Simó stopped DJing to run Puzzle, while Vidal, in a dispute over money, moved to a club called Bravatta. It was time for a fresh wave of talent.

Fran Lenaers, a wiry audiophile born to a Belgian father and a Spanish mother, was the most widely revered of this second wave, the closest thing La Ruta ever had to Larry Levan. He was the first to beatmatch and blend records—previously, DJs had mixed al corte, cutting from one track to the next. He incorporated a drum machine, a third deck and sometimes played cassettes. Every weekend at Spook Factory, the beachside club where he made his name, he played extremely long sets, sometimes 26 or 27 hours at a time, consuming nothing but pizzas and Coca-Cola.

"I've played with the best DJs in the world and the one who has impressed me the most is Fran Lenaers, taking into account, of course, the era, the music and what was available," said the DJ Kike Jaen. "His style was very traditional. His physical knowledge was incredible, the way he used frequencies, vibrations. We're talking about a very high level."

"He was an absolute master," said the DJ and venue owner David Verdeguer.

I sat down with Lenaers at Bar Piko's, a charming tapas spot not far from the partially built (and seemingly abandoned) Nou Mestalla football stadium in Valencia. He said he was annoyed because there'd been no waves earlier that day—he's a gifted surfer—though you wouldn't have known it from his big smile and boundless energy. For a DJ in his late 50s, he looks incredible.

We sat and talked for almost five hours. Every so often, in between hard-to-follow anecdotes from the Spook Factory days, he would occasionally start describing one of his favourite old mixes, step by step. It was immediately clear that he had a completely singular way of thinking. Even today, he'll sometimes still take 300 records, packed tight into orange crates and plastic bags, for a single show. If he can drive, he'll take extra turntables and CDJs, too, just in case.

Spook Factory

At Spook Factory, where he was a resident from the club's inception in 1984 through 1988, Lenaers was a superstar. In 1985, he was earning 250,000 pesetas a month, roughly €1500—a lot of money in those days. Within a year, he'd bought himself a house.

"Most people earned 80 or 100,000 [pesetas], but I was earning two or three times more," he said. "In 1986 or 87, the guy who owned Pacha offered me a winter residency in Madrid and three months in summer in Ibiza. He offered me 1 million pesetas [€6000] in Ibiza and 800,000 [€4800] in Madrid. Trips to and from Valencia during the week all paid for. Six trips a year to New York or London, all paid for, to buy records. And I said no. Why? Because it's cold in Madrid man!"

Lenaers' sets took the eclecticism of La Ruta to new heights. As well as the latest guitar music—rock, pop, new wave—he also played classical, EBM and Afrika Bambaataa, mixing seamlessly between disparate genres. Sometimes he glued the gaps using special tricks, such as panning the sound around the room or creating a flanger effect with two copies of the same record. He was an innovator.

"I had a way of DJing which was to announce the records," he said. "I'd put a small part of the melody or the intro, two or three times. And then play it one or two hours later. So when it comes in—even if it's the worst song of the year—it's the one you were waiting for. The best of the night. I'd do that a lot."

Pictured right: Fran Lenaers

After a slow start, Spook Factory's popularity ballooned, largely thanks to an administrative sanction that forced Barraca and Chocolate to close for two weeks. Typically, it was where everyone ended up, due to its late closing hours, inclusive door policy and broad musical range. All sorts of people gathered together on its pitch-black dance floor, from famous singers, fashion designers and film stars to drag queens, drug dealers and your average Joe. It was popular with the gay crowd. The DJ booth had been built to Lenaers' own specifications, and he also took the lead on the soundsystem, installing a Sonken model from Japan. By all accounts, the club sounded incredible.

Lenaers left Spook Factory in a whirl of controversy—in ¡Bacalao!, he says a security guard punched him in the mouth while he was DJing. This was 1988, and La Ruta was entering another new phase, powered by a new generation of clubbers. Mescalina had been replaced by cocaine, speed and ecstacy, which meant people were raving for longer. The clubs, now professionally run businesses with PR teams and big budgets, facilitated this, each opening at different times throughout the weekend, making it possible to party non-stop from Thursday through Monday. There was serious money to be made.

Enter the term La Ruta, which was coined to describe the phenomenon of hopping from club to club, stopping only to load up on drink and drugs in their huge car parks. On any given night, these dusty lots were dotted with thousands of cars blasting the latest tunes from custom-built stereos. (This became such a phenomenon of its own that Carlos Simó, then director of Puzzle, introduced a system where people had to pay to leave the venue if they wanted to return—he said he made €6000 extra on the first night.)

The success of Spook Factory had also grown the scene's reputation beyond Valencia, attracting ravers from all over Spain, in particular Barcelona, located a few hours up the coast. People came down in their droves to hear guitar music mixed with the freshest electronic styles, from EBM and New Beat to early Detroit techno and acid house. More and more, clubbers wanted their beats mas cañera—"harder."

Jorge Albi, Stiv Bators and Rafa Cervera

This hybrid sound was known as bacalao, which literally translates as "cod." How it became part of the lexicon of La Ruta is a much-contested story. The earliest version places it at the Zic Zac record shop around 1983. Originally a colloquial substitute for "cool record," it soon could be applied to pretty much anything. But the musical tag stuck, and by the late-'80s, it was synonymous with dark, tough electronic music.

Initially, bacalao referred to imported records or foreign sounds, but as the '90s crept in, it was also the name given to a local style of maquina, a style of fast, primitive dance music brewed in Barcelona that came to dominate La Ruta. Derived from German hardcore, the quality of the music was less important than its volume and intensity.

Maquina and bacalao were very similar—"like champagne and cava," said Antonio Hal—but maquina was harsher and more mechanical, while bacalao was cheesier. The most famous bacalao song, a record that would play a defining role in La Ruta's eventual downfall, was by a Valencian DJ-turned-singer called Chimo Bayo. "Asi Me Gusta A Mi" came out in June 1991 on the Spanish label Area Internacional and was a huge hit, selling over a million copies worldwide. The video appeared on MTV. All over Spain, people were singing its catchy chorus: Ecsta si, ecsta no. Everywhere, that is, except the dance floors of Valencia.

"A lot of people discovered us because of the phenomenon of Chimo Bayo, but here no one played his records, even though he was massive in the rest of Spain," said Luis Bonias. "No one played 'Asi Me Gusta A Mi.' Only sometimes in pubs or on the radio."

Even so, the record's success sent a strong message to the scene. A clutch of labels, such as Contraseña Records, launched overnight and began to release tracks in the vein of "Asi Me Gusta A Mi," often produced by local artists with little experience.

"[Chimo] wasn't well regarded here by the other DJs, so they think, 'Well if Chimo did it, so can we,'" said Antonio Hal. "Everyone started producing tracks, the most linear, the most effective, built for the dance floor. Very fast. Chimo managed to make the world take notice of something that no one thought would be successful. People jumped on the bandwagon, which distorted the industry. People took the easy route, the money route."

"Here starts a possible huge business opportunity, which creates a new scene with lots of new record labels, many of them linked to the clubs," said Costa. "They generated a product of very low quality, copies of hardcore from Holland or Germany, made by producers with little knowledge of electronic music, recorded poorly with low-quality vinyl that sounded bad. A kind of lobby of clubs, labels and local radio stations sprung up, and this created a very closed circuit that ended up swallowing itself."

Juanito "Torpedo" (left) with Depeche Mode

By focussing so intently on music made locally, the scene also stopped paying attention to what was happening elsewhere. Some trance and hard trance was played, sounds fast and epic enough to satisfy the pilled-up youngsters. But there was little room for the latest Detroit techno, Chicago house or UK IDM. La Ruta, a scene once so open-minded and forward-thinking, was now only looking inward. It had shut itself off.

"When I first listened to this music it was mostly Belgian-influenced, UK-influenced and Germany-influenced," said David Gomez, a former La Ruta raver who spent every summer from 1990 through 1996 staying with his grandmother in Valencia. He now lives in a modern flat in Friedrichshain, Berlin.

"EBM. New Beat. And of course also dark wave. It was a mixture of all of it. And this Belgian rave techno. R&S and so on. At that time I didn't get it all. I didn't know where this music came from," said Gomez. "Then as the years passed, the influence of the Spanish producers, or the Valencia-style producers, became bigger and bigger. And the music more cheesy. More Eurodance-influenced. That's when it all went downhill."

By 1994, Gomez said, the music took a turn for the worse. Dance covers of hits from the '80s. Trashy makina and Eurodance, often produced by Italian artists. All this sat under the broad umbrella of cantaditas, AKA pastelitos, a style that originated in the late-'80s when DJs began mixing New Beat with UK pop. A few years later, it had evolved into its own sound, characterised by blistering BPMs, cheesy vocals (often in English) and infantile melodies. New Limit's "Smile" and "Knockin'" by Double Vision are examples of popular cantaditas.

"You have to understand that the UK reaches a point where the sound evolves," said Luis Bonias. "After Manchester, UK artists start making trip-hop or drum & bass or breakbeat, which didn't work here. Here it was all about thumping four-on-the-floor. The whole broken rhythms thing didn't work."

"The '90s were the worst of the worst," said Antonio Hal.

This musical degradation was fundamental to the decline of La Ruta, but it wasn't the only contributing factor. In 1992, the then-socialist government introduced a new law, Ley Corcuera, to help combat the heroin epidemic tearing through Spain. It allowed the police to search any person or place without a warrant if there was a suspicion of drug dealing. By 1991, 50,000 ravers were descending on Valencia every weekend. Most of them drove cars and took drugs.

"So they start searching people on Carretera del Saler and other adjoining roads, and in the end people stopped going out because the police were fining them," said Costa.

Road accidents were also on the rise in the area, which the print magazine Trafico, run by the national body Dirección General de Tráfico, linked to La Ruta in a piece published in summer 1993. Some local media even tried to connect the dots between La Ruta and the tragedy of Las niñas de Alcàsser, in which three teenage girls were brutally raped and murdered while hitchhiking to a party. The club they were going to, Coloor, was a local spot around 40 km away with no connection to the scene.

One regional newspaper, Las Provincias, waged a campaign of hate against La Ruta. Some say it was the first to use the phrase La Ruta del Bakalao in its headlines, switching the "c" for a "k." This had a profound effect, somehow painting the scene in rougher, more extreme colours. (At some point, maquina also became "makina.") The name stuck.

"I don't recognise 'La Ruta del Bakalao,'" said Carlos Simó in ¡Bacalao!. "They tell me, 'Ruta del Bakalao' and I don't know what that is. It's idiotic, frankly. An invention of the press."

In 1993, the national TV network Canal + aired a documentary that would all but ring the death knell for La Ruta. Just shy of an hour long, La Ruta Del Bakalao: Hasta Que El Cuerpo Aguante—which roughly translates as "Until The Body Gives Up"—told the story of one weekend through multiple clubs, parties and characters, including the DJ Kike Jaen and the then-director of Barraca, Vicente Pizcueta. As the title suggests, its principal focus was La Ruta as endurance feat, which inevitably led to shots of wasted ravers and out-of-touch commentary on drugs.

Kike Jaen

"The documentary was presented to us as being about something special happening in Valencia and they focussed on the worst part," said Luis Bonias. "The mediator on the project deceived us because they ended up selling it in a totally different way."

"I'm going to confess something," said Kike Jaen. "When they went to record the film, they suggested me as the DJ because I was the only one who didn't drink or anything, so there was no chance of them catching me. The programme intended to look for ways to draw links between the scene and drugs."

The documentary sent shockwaves through households and political offices all over Spain, but it also put out a calling to the country's youth. Thousands more flocked to Valencia to get a taste of La Ruta as seen on TV. This meant more drugs, more cars and a greater appetite for faster, more commercial beats. The authorities weren't impressed.

"That's when it all broke, when they began to crush us on TV," said Jose Conca, Chocolate resident from 1986 through 2002. "Valencia didn't fall because of the crowd or the DJs. It fell because the police made sure it did. They were here with machine guns. Balaclavas. As if we were terrorists. Who wants to go clubbing in that environment?"

"I had helicopters of the Guardia Civil over the parking lot and dogs running loose looking for drugs," said Carlos Simó about Puzzle. "I had loads of problems with the police."

Little by little, the police suffocated the scene until the hordes stopped showing up. Instead of 5000 or 6000 people in a club, there were suddenly only 1000. Many venues, including Distrito 10, ACTV, Spook Factory, Heaven and Espiral, were forced to shut. Others soldiered on, finding ways to adapt to the times. By 1998, La Ruta was all but over.

"You see this all the time," said Jose Conca. "First a movement is authentic and bit by bit as it begins to grow, the economic factor enters the equation and by the end it's completely unrecognisable. Money perverts scenes."

ACTV, Heaven

While working on this feature, I clocked up hours of interviews with a handful of La Ruta's key players. To different degrees, all of the old guard balanced a certain arrogance with a sense of injustice. Everyone's contribution was the first or the best or the most important. (In many cases, they were right.) But they were also angry and frustrated that a scene so large and influential could have slipped through their fingers.

Something Jose Conca said particularly struck me. "It seems like it was in someone's interest to make foreigners go to Ibiza instead of Valencia. When Valencia fell, Ibiza took off."

I pressed several of the La Ruta DJs on this, but they had little to say. The comparison is surely too inviting to ignore. Two scenes with similar histories and characteristics, separated only by a narrow stretch of the Mediterranean. In the early '90s, makina was also popular in Ibiza, as were drugs, long parties and huge clubs with overflowing car parks. The key difference, perhaps, is that Ibiza was an island with a huge, wealthy tourism industry, whereas La Ruta was mostly full of Spaniards. The White Isle was a cash cow.

"Take into account that Valencia isn't a powerful city in Spain," said Conca. "This spawned envy, so Madrid had to disrupt our story because it was difficult to accept that a city like Valencia, the third in Spain, was the one leading from the front musically. They went after us."

Part of the residual bitterness felt by Conca and co. also stems from the fact that their careers took a hit the day La Ruta finished. You can see why. Even at their peak, when they were local superstars, these DJs were fiercely loyal to their scene and rarely played outside Valencia. Conca told me he turned down offers from several Ibiza clubs. The same goes for Fran Lenaers. As such, their reputations depended on the health of La Ruta. When it went under, so did they.

Some of these DJs still play professionally, though mostly at anniversary or so-called Remember events, where they're required to play music from the '80s and '90s. Lenaers, who played Sónar Barcelona in 2017 and Kaiku in Helsinki last year, still lands the occasional good show, but his main job is fixing club soundsystems. Carlos Simó retired from the nightlife industry when Puzzle closed in 2011.

As for today's electronic scene, there's a small community of clubs, promoters and record shops plugging away, though reggaeton dominates the landscape. Barraca, which enjoyed a revival in the '00s as a bastion of minimal techno, hosting the likes of Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos and Jeff Mills, is the only La Ruta club still hosting relevant DJs, but it opens once or twice a month at most.

When I visited Barraca and Chocolate back in August, I was accompanied by David Verdeguer and Daniel Kyo, two DJs who have been involved with dance music in Valencia since the '90s and '00s respectively. Today, Verdeguer runs a party, a label, a couple venues and a record shop. Kyo DJs and makes house music. He told me he was moving to Berlin because nothing was happening in Valencia.

Part of the problem with La Ruta, they said over white wine and paella, was that the older generation weren't interested in passing the baton. "It's a cultural thing among the people here," said Kyo. "This idea of community and supporting one another doesn't exist."

"Back then in Valencia, it was all about hierarchy," said Verdeguer. "You had to respect your elders, no matter what they did. You had to work with whatever they gave you. Even if they were already past it. Even if they weren't good enough. In business, in nightclubs, wherever. If you arrived last, you had to keep your mouth shut."

He added: "They worked incredibly hard to build a scene. Really hard and really well. Those clubs were incredible, better than Ibiza or anywhere else. The vibe, the decoration and, of course, the mescalina were of the highest quality. What they didn't know is how to evolve it and how to maintain it. They only knew how to exploit it. Eventually, the golden goose is going to stop laying eggs."

Additional reporting by José Cabrera.