Few cocktail names trip off the tongue with the lyric trill of Agua de Valencia. It even sounds sweet and clear. Purportedly invented at the Café Madrid in 1959 by bartender Constante Gil, it is so popular with tourists to Valencia that bottles labeled as Agua de Valencia are available everywhere from the Mercat Central to most souvenir shops. Look around the tables on Plaça de Mare de Deu behind the cathedral, and at least half sport a tall glass of the orange drink.

And why not? Authentic Agua de Valencia relies on freshly squeezed juice from locally grown sweet oranges. (They are not ‶Valencia″ oranges, which were bred in California and named for the city.) Groves of sweet oranges surround Valencia. All grocery stores and even many convenience stores have machines to squeeze fresh juice from the fruit.

The cocktail formula is pretty simple — three shots of orange juice, a shot of gin, a shot of vodka, a half-shot of simple syrup. Stir to mix with a couple of ice cubes, strain into a chilled champagne coupe and top it all off with a three-shot pour of cava on top.

We had kind of hoped Ernest Hemingway had some connection to the cocktail. But no dice. As far as we can tell, Ernest Hemingway never drank an Agua de Valencia, as the bar was founded in 1940, years after his extended residence as a Spanish Civil War correspondent. Apparently he did most of his drinking then in the Café del Siglo, now a capuccino bar on Calle Paz. The famous war photographer, Robert Capa, captured Hemingway drinking straight from the bottle on the night before they both went to cover the Battle of Teruel.

Even without the Hemingway imprimatur, Café Madrid (Abadia de Sant Martí, 10, Valencia; +34 960 660 507, myrhotels.com) is an elegant bar decorated in a voluptuous if anachronistic hybrid of Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. A glass of the signature cocktail is only €6, a pitcher €24. The bar is on the ground floor of the Hotel de Marqués, which represents it as a historic bohemian, intellectual hangout—the kind of place where Spain’s famous tertulias took place. We can’t confirm that. No one seemed to be debating the issues of the day when we stopped in.

But bartender Aida does make a delicious Agua de Valencia, as she demonstrates here: