The Colón market is located at number 19, calle Jorge Juan. The building was designed and built by the architect Francisco Mora Berenguer between 1914 and 1916. It is one of the best examples of Valencian modernist architecture from the beginning of the century. It has also been declared a National Monument.

It is currently refurbished and equipped with shops and establishments dedicated to the hotel and catering trade. It was intended to meet the growing needs of Valencia's Ensanche district, which was dominated by the bourgeois class.

It was designed in 1914 by Francisco Mora Berenguer (1875-1961), who studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture and had very direct contact with Catalan modernism, especially with the work of Gaudí, Puig i Cadafalch, Doménech i Montaner and with the conception of his teachers Antonio M.ª Gallissá i Soque and Joan Torras i Guardiola of architecture as a total work of art, the result of the compendium of all the arts and crafts.

Mora's works were not considered modernist at the time. The word modernisme was then a pejorative term used to describe only architecture imported from Brussels or Vienna, with banal forms or decorations. Both Mora's modernism and that of Doménech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch were considered to be modern architecture that emerged from traditional architecture, ornamented and adapted to the needs of the time with the help of new materials.

The administrative antecedents of the Colón market can be found in the continuous petitions from owners and neighbours to the City Council around 1890, in which they requested the establishment of provisional or definitive markets in the Ensanche area to avoid the itinerant selling that was generated by the need to obtain goods and basic necessities without the inconvenience of going to the distant Central or Ruzafa markets. The gestation of the project for the Colón market did not begin with the commission that Mora received as municipal architect in 1913, but three years earlier, with his proposal for the central market that was finally awarded to Alejandro Soler and Francisco Guardia, in which he suggested many of the forms that he would later use in the project for the Ensanche market. Demetrio Ribes was appointed architect director of the works, given his experience in handling metal structures for railway stations. It was he who designed the metal structure of the roof, based on open Y-shaped side canopies that provided the building with better ventilation.

The original project for the market presented by Mora on 17 April 1913 was modified on several occasions in response to the suggestions of the Enlargement Commission, affecting the configuration and decoration of the façades facing Filipinas and Ciscar streets, the incorporation of the overhangs on the side façades and the final layout of the stalls. The final plans were delivered on 8 August 1913. The construction of the market was marked by doubts as to whether it should have one or more basements in the basement of the market. In response to a request from the president of the municipal commission for the expansion on 14 July 1915, Mora drew up a couple of projects for its construction, which were finally rejected by the same commission.

The Colón market, like any modernist work, participates in a vast vision of architecture as a total work of art, in which the design extends from the conception of the building to each of the elements that make it up, with special emphasis on the applied arts. In this way, Mora placed special interest in the design of the cast-iron columns, in brick, in polychrome ceramics: used as an aesthetic and ornamental element in mosaics and façade cladding, glass, stone masonry, artificial stone, used for the iconographic programme of the Market, and carpentry. In view of the above, Francisco Mora's taste for detail and the esteem in which this architect held craftsmen and artists were held is clear.

On 24th December 1916, Christmas Eve, the Colón market was inaugurated, and according to a local newspaper, it was a spectacular event: from the bullring came a cavalcade formed by the Municipal Mounted Guard, with the city's timpani and bugles, the Rock of Fame, the market sellers, the groups "La pesca", "Aves y carnes" and "Flores, frutas y hortalizas", a float occupied by the Queen of the Fiesta accompanied by her court of honour. The Municipal Band and a section of the Guardia Civil closed the festivities.

Little by little the market declined at the end of the 20th century, the traders who had rented benches from the Town Hall were retiring, retiring or simply closing down because the deterioration and lack of maintenance of the market was driving away their customers. In spite of everything, the Mayor's Office had its headquarters there until the year 2000.

Nowadays, after the restoration that culminated in 2003, directed by the architect Enrique Martínez-Díaz, the old Colón market has been transformed into a catering centre, with a traditional horchatería, a bio-cafeteria-bio-brewery, a café-franchise, two foreign breweries and a restaurant coexisting with a florist's shop and the only three original establishments that have survived: A delicatessen delicatessen, a fishmonger's and a greengrocer's; a first basement which houses a parking area, leaving the central part free for cultural events.