City of Arts and Sciences

A catastrophic flood is the reason this futuristic complex exists at all. When the River Turia burst its banks in 1957 and devastated Valencia, the city’s response was to divert the river away entirely — leaving a ten-kilometre scar of dry riverbed through the city centre that sat largely empty for decades, until it became the site of some of the most striking architecture built anywhere in Spain.

Built in the ruins of a disaster

The 1957 flood was severe enough to permanently change Valencia’s relationship with its own river. Rather than rebuild along the same course, the city diverted the Turia’s flow south of the centre entirely, leaving its old bed running directly through Valencia empty and unused. For years, the dry riverbed remained an awkward, underdeveloped gap in the city — until planners in the 1980s and 90s recognised what it actually offered: a ready-made, ten-kilometre linear space, cutting straight from the old town to the sea, with almost no existing buildings to work around.

A native son’s answer, built one building at a time

Valencia-born architect Santiago Calatrava won the commission, and construction began in July 1996 on a 350,000-square-metre stretch of the former riverbed. Rather than opening all at once, the complex arrived building by building over nearly a decade: L’Hemisfèric, an IMAX cinema and planetarium shaped like a giant eye, opened first in 1998; the Príncipe Felipe science museum followed in 2000; L’Oceanogràfic, now the largest aquarium in Europe, opened in 2001; and the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía opera house completed the core ensemble in 2005. Each building extended the same visual language — white concrete, sweeping curves, forms that echo water and movement — across a site that, within living memory, had been the source of the city’s worst modern disaster.

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