Qualla: City of Arts and Sciences

City of Arts and Sciences: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Braddoskas, CC BY-SA 3.0 es. It looks like a fleet of enormous white creatures beached in the bed of a vanished river - a blinking eye, the ribcage of a whale, a giant water lily, a bird's folded feather - all cast in pale concrete and mirrored in shallow blue pools. This is the City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia's temple to the modern age, rising at the seaward end of the old Turia riverbed that a flood emptied in 1957. Its lines are so strange and so severe that filmmakers keep borrowing it to stand in for the future, from Tomorrowland to a version of Los Angeles in 2053. In real life it is one of the 12 Treasures of Spain, and the single image most travelers now carry home from Valencia.

Image: Braddoskas | CC BY-SA 3.0 es

City of Arts and Sciences: The Eye That Opens

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wilson Center, CC BY-SA 3.0. The complex began with an eye. L'Hemisfèric, opened in 1998, was the first piece completed, and its architect Santiago Calatrava built it in the unmistakable shape of a human eye - locals call it the "eye of knowledge." A curved shell of aluminum slats forms the eyelid, folding u...

Image: Wilson Center | CC BY-SA 3.0

City of Arts and Sciences: A Whale, a Lily, a Feather

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Each building wears its own metaphor. The Príncipe Felipe science museum, opened in 2000, arcs like the skeleton of a great whale and holds the largest exhibition space in Spain, where visitors walk a "Chromosome Forest" that maps human DNA. Nearby, the Oceanogràfic of 2003 - the...

Image: Diliff | CC BY-SA 3.0

City of Arts and Sciences: The Local Boy Who Built It

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Casafacilefelice, CC BY-SA 3.0. Calatrava was not an outsider parachuted in; he is Valencia's own son, born just outside the city, and the complex is his hometown magnum opus. His signature runs through it in white ribs, cantilevered shells, and taut cables. The tallest gesture is a bridge: the Assut de l'Or, f...

Image: Casafacilefelice | CC BY-SA 3.0

City of Arts and Sciences: Work of the Pharaohs

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit José Luis Navarro Lizandra, CC BY-SA 3.0. The vision did not come cheap, and not everyone cheered. The idea dates to 1989, when the regional president Joan Lerma, inspired by a science museum he had seen in Paris, commissioned a scientist to draft a "city of science" for Valencia. Opponents in the Popular Party mocked it...

Image: José Luis Navarro Lizandra | CC BY-SA 3.0