The Idea · 1957–1991
<p>A catastrophic flood, a drained riverbed, and a decade of proposals before a single stone was laid.</p>
Santiago Calatrava's gleaming white science-city rose from the drained bed of a river that once destroyed Valencia — and became, in equal measure, the city's proudest icon and its most expensive argument. From a 1989 trip to Paris and a 370-metre tower that was never built, through eleven years of construction, to a €1.2 billion bill, a roof that fell off, a lawsuit against the architect, and a second life as Hollywood's favourite future city. Part of the story told in our <a href="https://boromlia.com/timeline/dc83bf7c-9b54-42c9-8cc7-8fe702152c73">The Evolution of Valencia</a> timeline. Compiled from public sources; all photographs are freely licensed (Wikimedia Commons).
<p>A catastrophic flood, a drained riverbed, and a decade of proposals before a single stone was laid.</p>
<p>On 14 October the river <strong>Turia</strong> burst through Valencia, drowning the city centre under metres of water and mud and killing dozens. The response was radical: under the <em>Plan Sur</em> the river was diverted in a new channel around the city's south, and the old bed through the heart of Valencia was left dry.</p>
<p>Madrid's plan was to pave the empty riverbed as a motorway. Valencians campaigned against it under the slogan <em>“el llit del Túria és nostre”</em> — the riverbed is ours — and won. The bed became the <strong>Jardí del Túria</strong>, a nine-kilometre green ribbon curving through the city. Its far south-eastern end is where the science-city would one day stand.</p>
<p>Returning from the brand-new <strong>Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie</strong> in Paris, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, <strong>Joan Lerma</strong>, commissions the scientist <strong>Antonio Ten Ros</strong> to draft a science city for Valencia. His first proposal — <em>“Vilanova, A City of Science for Valencia”</em> — is presented that May.</p>
<p>Ten Ros is formally commissioned to direct a full draft, budgeted at <strong>92,650,000 pesetas</strong> (about €556,000) and managed by the University of Valencia. He assembles a team of <strong>56</strong> scientists, museologists and designers — a museum conceived, at this stage, by scientists rather than architects.</p>
<p>In May the council approves the transfer of the land at the seaward end of the old riverbed. The project has a site.</p>
<p>Four months later the plan is presented: three structures — a <strong>370-metre communications tower</strong> (which would have been the third-tallest in the world), a planetarium and a science museum — designed by the Valencia-born architect <strong>Santiago Calatrava</strong>, who wins the competition and is then handed the whole complex. Estimated cost: around 25,000 million pesetas, roughly <strong>€300 million</strong>.</p>
<p>On 21 December, Ten Ros presents his completed draft — <strong>32 volumes</strong> — to President Lerma at the Palace of the Generalitat. But the scientific team and Calatrava do not see eye to eye on how the museum should be conceived, and the design begins to change.</p>
<p>A change of government, a cancelled tower, a new architect on board — and the first earth moved.</p>
<p>Preliminary site work begins at the end of 1994, five years after the first proposal.</p>
<p>The conservative <strong>Partido Popular</strong> defeats the Socialists, having attacked the science city as a <em>“work of the pharaohs”</em> built to swell Socialist egos. In office, successive PP governments do the opposite of cancelling it — they continue and dramatically expand the complex, at a cost that will indebt the city for a generation.</p>
<p>The defining decision. The planned telecommunications tower is <strong>cancelled</strong> and replaced by an opera house — considerably more expensive — and the Spanish-Mexican shell-concrete master <strong>Félix Candela</strong> is brought in to design an oceanographic park. The name changes accordingly from <em>City of Science and Communications</em> to the <strong>City of Arts and Sciences</strong>, and the state company Vacico is renamed <strong>CACSA</strong>.</p>
<p>Full construction starts under CACSA in July 1996. It will not stop for thirteen years.</p>
<p>Work begins on the <strong>Palau de les Arts</strong> — using the same foundations and the same contract that had been drawn up for the cancelled communications tower. In December, Félix Candela dies at 87; his oceanographic park will be completed after his death.</p>
<p>One structure at a time, the complex takes shape along Calatrava's kilometre-long axis of water and white concrete.</p>
<p>On <strong>16 April 1998</strong> the complex opens to the public with <strong>L'Hemisfèric</strong> — an IMAX cinema, planetarium and laserium built as a giant <em>eye</em>. Aluminium awnings fold up like an eyelid; the dome inside is the iris; and because the surrounding pool has a glass bottom, the reflection completes the eye. Stand at opposite pillars inside and you can hold a conversation in a whisper.</p>
<p>Eleven months after L'Hemisfèric, president <strong>Eduardo Zaplana</strong> inaugurates the <strong>Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe</strong> — even though the building is nowhere near finished. It will be another twenty months before the public can actually go inside.</p>
<p>The science museum finally opens for real. Ribbed like the skeleton of a whale, it runs <strong>220 m long, 80 m wide and 55 m high</strong>, and swallowed 58,000 m³ of concrete, 14,000 tonnes of steel and 4,000 panes of glass. Its 26,000 m² of exhibition space make it the largest in Spain — with a motto to match: <em>“forbidden not to touch.”</em></p>
<p>A 320-metre landscaped promenade of <strong>55 fixed and 54 floating arches</strong>, planted entirely with species native to the Valencia region — 99 palms, 62 bitter orange trees, rosemary, lavender and bougainvillea, chosen to change colour with the seasons. Inside runs the Walk of the Sculptures, an open-air gallery including a work by <strong>Yoko Ono</strong>.</p>
<p>Félix Candela's posthumous masterpiece opens: the <strong>largest aquarium in Europe</strong>, 110,000 m² holding <strong>42 million litres</strong> of water and more than 500 species — belugas, walruses, penguins, sharks and rays — across Mediterranean, Arctic, Antarctic, wetland and Red Sea environments, under thin concrete shells shaped like water lilies.</p>
<p>Four times over budget, a roof shedding its mosaic skin, and Valencia in court against its most famous son.</p>
<p>Calatrava proposes to crown the complex with <strong>three sculptural towers</strong> of 308, 266 and 220 metres, representing Valencia, Alicante and Castellón — a project estimated to take more than two decades. It is quietly put on hold, and never built.</p>
<p><strong>Queen Sofía</strong> inaugurates the <strong>Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía</strong>, and the complex is formally opened on <em>Valencian Community Day</em>. Two laminated steel shells weighing over <strong>3,000 tonnes</strong> wrap a building 230 m long and 70 m high — a plumed metal helmet floating over four auditoriums, clad in the white ceramic <em>trencadís</em> mosaic that unites the whole site.</p>
<p>A bridge of two halves: an older straight northern span by <strong>José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez</strong>, joined to a new curving southern segment on white arched supports by Calatrava — threading the road between the opera house and the eye.</p>
<p>A white cable-stayed bridge hung from a single curved pylon. At <strong>125 metres</strong>, that pylon is the highest point in the whole of Valencia — and the closest thing the complex ever got to the tower it was supposed to begin with.</p>
<p>The last structure opens: a soaring covered plaza for concerts, congresses and sport — it will host the <strong>Valencia Open 500</strong> tennis tournament. Thirteen years after the first excavator arrived, the City of Arts and Sciences is finished. Final cost: <strong>€1,200 million</strong>.</p>
<p>The arithmetic becomes public and brutal. Three buildings budgeted at <strong>€300 million</strong> in 1991 had become a complex costing <strong>four times</strong> that — the 1996 expansion alone adding some €800 million. Challenged over fees reported at around €100 million, Calatrava tells <em>El País</em> he considers them <em>“even modest.”</em></p>
<p>The <em>New York Times</em> puts Calatrava's troubled projects on its front page. In Valencia a protest website — <em>“Calatrava bleeds you dry”</em> — catalogues the overruns; he sues over it and wins in 2014, but the nickname sticks.</p>
<p>The <em>trencadís</em> mosaic skin of the opera house, which had begun to wrinkle a year earlier, starts <strong>coming away in chunks</strong> in high winds. Performances are cancelled and the Palau de les Arts is closed to the public.</p>
<p>The regional government announces it will sue <strong>Calatrava and his firm</strong> for the cost of repairs — an extraordinary rupture between a city and the hometown architect who had given it its global image.</p>
<p>Tomorrowland, Doctor Who, Westworld and Star Wars — plus €113 million a year for the local economy.</p>
<p>Disney's <em>Tomorrowland</em> shoots its gleaming city of the future here — the beginning of the complex's second career as the default on-screen shorthand for <em>tomorrow</em>.</p>
<p>The investigation concludes that the fault lay not with Calatrava's design but with the <strong>subcontractor</strong> responsible for the adhesive used to fix the mosaic tiles. The building is repaired and reopened.</p>
<p>The BBC films the <em>Doctor Who</em> episode <em>“Smile”</em> among the white shells, casting the complex as a gleaming human colony on a distant world.</p>
<p>Two decades on, the numbers turn. The complex is reported to contribute <strong>€113 million a year</strong> to the local economy and to sustain <strong>3,509 jobs</strong> — the most important modern tourist destination in Valencia, and one of the <em>12 Treasures of Spain</em>.</p>
<p>HBO's <em>Westworld</em> uses the complex as the headquarters of DELOS in its third season; the same year it appears in <em>Brave New World</em> and <em>Bill & Ted Face the Music</em>.</p>
<p>The Àgora — long criticised as a spectacular building without a purpose — finally gets one. After four years of works, <strong>CaixaForum València</strong> opens inside it on 22 June with 6,500 m² of galleries, in the presence of Ximo Puig, mayor Joan Ribó and Isidro Fainé.</p>
<p><em>Star Wars</em> series <em>Andor</em> uses the complex for the planet <strong>Coruscant</strong> — the latest in a line running through <em>Cosmos</em>, <em>Intergalactic</em> and a K-pop video. Calatrava built a science city; the world films the future in it.</p>
<p>Nearly seventy years after the flood that emptied the riverbed, Valencia's most divisive project is simply its most recognisable one — an argument about money that turned into a landmark. The full civic story continues in <a href="https://boromlia.com/timeline/dc83bf7c-9b54-42c9-8cc7-8fe702152c73">The Evolution of Valencia</a>.</p>