estar en la luna de Valencia

Literally: To be in the moon of Valencia

Example: “Le pregunté tres veces la hora y seguía en la luna de Valencia.” — I asked him the time three times, and he still had his head in the clouds.

English equivalent: To have one's head in the clouds

Origin: No single theory is fully confirmed. One traces it to medieval Valencia's city walls, whose gates closed nightly at the sound of a curfew bell and reopened only at dawn — anyone arriving just too late to get inside had no choice but to spend the night outside, exposed "a la luna de Valencia," under Valencia's moon. A second, offered by journalist Vicente Vidal Corella, ties the phrase instead to the 17th-century expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, when many were forced to wait for days on the beaches near Valencia for the ships that would carry them to North Africa — stranded under that same moon while their fate was decided elsewhere. A third, more purely linguistic theory treats it as a natural extension of the older "dejar a la luna," to leave someone with nothing, applied here to anyone left without what they had hoped for or expected.