Museo del Chocolate Valor

The Museo del Chocolate Valor occupies the original factory building that Valeriano López, known as “Valor,” put up in 1881 in Villajoyosa to make chocolate to order for people around the district. The factory has never moved site: it has simply expanded onto adjoining plots to become one of the country’s largest chocolate makers, now run by the fifth generation of the same family.

Machinery spanning more than a century

The museum, open since 1998, holds one of Spain’s most complete collections of chocolate-making machinery. The tour runs from the stone tools once used to grind cacao by hand, similar to those used in pre-Columbian America, through to the early steam machines and the industrial equipment that replaced manual work over the 20th century.

The company today makes chocolate bars, pralines and other cocoa products distributed across Spain, while keeping small-batch production lines that echo the techniques shown in the museum itself.

Thanks to its long, unbroken history, Valor is considered one of the oldest chocolate factories still operating anywhere in the world. The museum sits right beside the current production plant, so the visit mixes historical pieces with a sense of how the industrial process still runs today.

It is a short visit, a little over an hour, and works well as a plan for a rainy or very hot day. It pairs well with a walk through the town’s old town, a short distance from the museum, or as a comparison with the province’s other great sweet-making industry, the Museo del Turrón in Jijona; both rank among the area’s most-visited museums.