The Collector: Hortensia Herrero and Valencia's Art Renaissance

Not many in the artworld have heard of Hortensia Herrero, but last April her eponymous art centre inaugurated Anselm Kiefer’s first exhibition in Spain in two decades.

Housed in a seventeenthth-century Baroque palace in the Mediterranean city of Valencia, the centre has quickly become a significant player on the national contemporary art scene thanks to its ever-expanding collection. J. ust as quickly, though far more discreetly, Herrero herself has emerged as one of the country’s leading contemporary art collectors.

Herrero, a billionaire businesswoman and Valencian native, is intensely private. She does not give interviews and, while a regular at art fairs, prefers intimate visits to the studios of the artists she admires. In a statement sent to The Art Journal, Javier Molins, curator at the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero (CAHH), describes her as someone with “an enormous passion for art and a very keen eye”. In 2024 and 2025, she was the only Spaniard on the ArtNews Top 200 Collectors list, alongside figures such as Bernard Arnault, François Pinault, and Miuccia Prada.

Her collection features not only international household names such as Georg Baselitz, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor, but also Valencian artists like Andreu Alfaro and Manolo Valdés. “In fact, for more than 12 years we have participated in Abierto Valencia, the event that kicks off the city’s gallery season every September, featuring an acquisition award through which we have acquired 26 works by 21 artists from 13 galleries in the city,” Molins says.

In 2023, the CAHH opened to house Herrero’s collection following a €40m restoration of the Valeriola Palace in Valencia’s old town. Since then, it has welcomed more than 400,000 visitors. Initially, over 90 percent were local, but international visitors now account for around 40 percent. “Just the other day I welcomed a couple of collectors who had travelled all the way from Phoenix specifically to visit the art centre,” Molins says. The objective of the CAHH and Herrero’s wish, he adds, is “to bring the very best of the international art scene to Valencia, so that its residents do not have to travel to London, Paris or New York to see the finest contemporary art”. For Spain's third largest city, behind Madrid and Barcelona, the ambition is pointed.

Much like the rest of Spain, the end of the dictatorship in 1975 plunged Valencia into a frenzied counterculture. As one of the country’s main entry points for cocaine and heroin, the industrial, portuary city became synonymous with nightlife excess. The early 2000s brought an attempt at reinvention with the Santiago Calatrava designed Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, though the neo-futurist art and entertainment complex saddled the regional government with hundreds of millions of euros in debt. Today, Valencia has softened its rougher edges and transformed itself into an affordable yet cosmopolitan alternative for young professionals and families priced out of Spain’s two biggest cities.

Facade of the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero, formerly Valeriola Palace, 2025 Photo: Nastassia Tarusava

A budding scene burdened by political interference and natural disasters

The city did not have a major public contemporary art museum until 2016. “There was a large fine arts museum, a big modern art museum, and some public and private exhibition spaces,” says José Luis Pérez Pont, former director of the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània (CCCC). At the time, the institution operated largely as an extension of Valencia’s Museum of Fine Arts and lacked a cohesive programme. In 2016, Pérez Pont won a public tender with a proposal to turn it into “a space where contemporary visual art coexisted with cinema, dance, music and performance”.

During his tenure, the CCCC organised 101 public tenders and supported the production of 1,700 artistic projects. “After the 2008 crisis, artists who had left Spain returned to Valencia because they saw that the new social and cultural context made it possible for them to thrive professionally,” he recalls. By 2023, annual visitor numbers had risen from 71,000 to 330,000, and the institution ranked eighth nationally for cultural destinations, alongside the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía in Madrid and Bilbao’s Guggenheim. With the opening of the CAHH that same year, contemporary art in Valencia appeared to be having a moment.

That momentum faltered when Pérez Pont was dismissed in November by the newly elected regional government, a coalition between the conservative Partido Popular and the far-right Vox party. A year-and-a-half later, a court ruled the dismissal baseless. “The extreme right seeks to occupy cultural spaces to build a narrative aligned with its ideology,” Pérez Pont says. While visitor numbers continue to grow, by 2025 the CCCC had fallen out of the national cultural rankings.

A second blow came with the October 2024 floods, which killed 237 people across the region in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Spain’s modern history. Galleries, museums, churches and archaeological sites sustained damage throughout the region. The worst-hit area was La Horta, home to many artists. In Juan Olivares’ studio, the water rose to chest height before he fled to the upper floors of his home in Catarroja. He is internationally exhibited, and part of Herrero’s collection. The following day, mud coated his tools and canvases—two from every series he had produced over the past three decades.

Thanks to the support from private foundations, universities and museums, Olivares’ studio and 15 of his large-scale works have been fully restored. “I was able to recover part of the artistic memory of these past 30 years. Not all of it, but some at least,” he says. His benefactors, he adds, wish to remain anonymous.

Installation view of Anselm Kiefer’s Danaë, 2016–2021 in the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero (CAHH) in Valencia, Spain. Photo: Nastassia Tarusava.

A supermarket fortune 

If Herrero remains largely unknown to the public, the source of her fortune occupies an outsized place in the Spanish economy and imagination. She is vice-president of Mercadona, one of the country’s dominant supermarket chains. Her husband, Juan Roig, the company’s chief executive, ranked as Spain’s fourth wealthiest person in 2025, while Herrero was seventh. Mercadona also commands exceptional brand power, with social media filled with shopping hauls and memes featuring its famous jingle. “You say the word supermarket in Spain and it’ll be the first thing most people think of, even more so in Valencia,” Davide Faoro, a political communications expert and Valencian native, tells me.

The floods also damaged the brand. Mercadona’s handling of the crisis drew fierce public criticism. A video showing the helicopter rescue of one of its delivery drivers went viral, followed by footage of Roig arguing with shoppers who criticised the company’s reluctance to recall its workers when the initial weather alerts were issued. Herrero, characteristically, stayed out of the fray. “She threw herself into helping those affected and allocated more than €4 million to assist schools, music societies, textile companies and dance schools in the towns that had been hit hardest,” Molins says in his statement. “In addition — and this is something that has not been made public — she also helped rebuild the studios of two artists featured in the collection whose workspaces had been completely destroyed by the floods, as well as other cultural spaces.”

After the floods, a gallery in Mallorca offered Olivares an exhibition; another in Barcelona followed. They were a breath of fresh air. “They reactivated the work, brought me back to what things were,” he says. He is now preparing an exhibition at the Fundación Chirivella Soriano, housed in a Gothic palace in central Valencia. Like him, other affected artists are in the process of recovering. On May 15, the CCCC inaugurated a show featuring the work of 60 artists whose studios were affected by the floods.

Olivares is optimistic about contemporary creation in the city. While acknowledging Herrero’s support for Valencian art, he credits Pérez Pont’s tenure at the CCCC with transforming the scene over the past decade. “There’s now a great desire to create,” he says, “to recover, to get back to what things were.”