Santiago Calatrava's white science city stands in the drained bed of the river that flooded Valencia in 1957. It took thirteen years to build and cost €1.2 billion, four times the first estimate; the ceramic skin of its opera house came off in the wind, and its architect went to court over a website that mocked him. Film crews now use it as a ready-made future. Part of the story told in The Evolution of Valencia. Photos: Wikimedia Commons.
The Flood That Cleared the Ground
On 14 October 1957, after two days of torrential rain, the Turia broke its banks and put the centre of Valencia under several metres of water and mud. The official death toll was 81; local historians have long argued that the real figure was higher. The regime's answer was the Plan Sur: a new channel about 12 kilometres long and 175 metres wide, cut three kilometres south of the old river mouth and built to carry 5,000 cubic metres of water a second. Valencians paid part of the bill through a surcharge of 25 céntimos on every letter they posted. The new channel was inaugurated in 1969, and the old riverbed through the city was left dry.
The Idea, 1957-1991
A flood, a dry riverbed, a visit to Paris and a draft in thirty-two volumes. Thirty-four years pass between the disaster and the first design.
A Riverbed Becomes a Park
On 1 December 1976, on his first official visit to Valencia as king, Juan Carlos I signed the decree handing the dry riverbed to the city. The plans still ran a motorway down it. For two years residents marched under the slogan "El llit del Túria és nostre i el volem verd" (the riverbed is ours and we want it green), and in 1978 the council rezoned the whole bed as garden. Ricardo Bofill drafted the first plan in 1981. The final scheme, approved in February 1984, divided the park into 18 sections. The last of them, at the seaward end, is where the science city would be built.
A Visit to Paris
In 1989 Joan Lerma, president of the Generalitat Valenciana, came back from the new Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris wanting something similar for Valencia. Through his director of planning, José María Bernabé, he commissioned the University of Valencia academic Antonio Ten Ros to draft it. The first proposal, Vilanova, a City of Science for Valencia, reached the Generalitat that May.
A Team of Fifty-Six
In 1990 Ten Ros was given 92,650,000 pesetas (about €556,000), administered by the University of Valencia, to turn the idea into a full draft. He assembled 56 scientists, museologists and designers; the historian of medicine José María López Piñero took charge of a section called A walk through history. At this stage the museum was being planned from the inside out, by the people who would fill it.
The Land Is Transferred
In May 1991 the council approved the transfer of land at the seaward end of the old riverbed. The project had a site, and still no architect.
Calatrava Gets the Commission
Four months later the Generalitat presented a three-building plan by the Valencia-born architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava: a 370-metre communications tower, which would have been the third tallest in the world, a planetarium and a science museum. The package was called the City of Science and Communications and was costed at about 25,000 million pesetas, roughly €300 million.
Thirty-Two Volumes
On 21 December 1991 Ten Ros delivered the finished draft, in 32 volumes, to Lerma at the Palau de la Generalitat. By then the scientific team and Calatrava disagreed about how the museum building should be conceived. Calatrava's design went ahead, with changes.
First Earth Moved
Preliminary site work began at the end of 1994, five years after the first proposal and three after Calatrava's plan.
Redesign and Groundworks, 1994-1998
A change of government, a cancelled tower, a second architect, and the first earth moved.
A Change of Government
In the regional election of 28 May 1995 the Partido Popular defeated the Socialists. In opposition it had called the science city a "work of the pharaohs", built to flatter Socialist egos. In office, under Eduardo Zaplana, it kept the project and made it much larger, and much more expensive.
The Tower Becomes an Opera House
The new government cancelled the communications tower and put an opera house, a more expensive building, in its place. It also brought in Félix Candela, the Spanish-Mexican master of thin concrete shells, to design an oceanographic park. In July the state company Vacico (Valencia, Ciencia y Comunicaciones) became Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, S.A., known as CACSA, and the project took the name it still has.
Construction Begins
Full construction began under CACSA in July 1996. It ran without a break until 2009.
Built on the Tower's Foundations
Work began on the Palau de les Arts using the foundations, and the contract, that had been drawn up for the cancelled tower. On 7 December 1997 Félix Candela died, aged 87. His aquarium was finished without him.
Eleven Years of Building, 1998-2009
One building at a time along Calatrava's axis, almost two kilometres of water and white concrete.
L'Hemisfèric Opens
The complex opened to the public on 16 April 1998 with L'Hemisfèric, an IMAX cinema and planetarium built as a giant eye. Aluminium louvres along the 110-metre shell fold upward like an eyelid, the dome inside is the iris, and because the pool around it has a glass floor, the reflection completes the eye. Calatrava said he made water the main element of the site because Valencia is so dry.
A Museum Opened Twice
In March 1999, eleven months after L'Hemisfèric, President Eduardo Zaplana inaugurated the Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe. The building was not finished. The public got in twenty months later.
The Whale Skeleton
The science museum opened to the public on 13 November 2000. It is 220 metres long, 80 wide and 55 high, ribbed like the skeleton of a whale, and took 58,000 cubic metres of concrete, 14,000 tonnes of steel and 4,000 panes of glass. Its 26,000 square metres of exhibition space are the largest in Spain. The house motto is Prohibido no tocar: it is forbidden not to touch.
L'Umbracle
A 320-metre garden walk under 55 fixed and 54 floating arches, each 18 metres high. The planting is mostly from the Valencia region: 99 palms, 78 dwarf palms, 62 bitter orange trees, rosemary and lavender, with honeysuckle and bougainvillea chosen to change colour through the year. The Walk of the Sculptures runs through it, with work by Miquel Navarro, Yoko Ono and others. Underneath is the car park.
L'Oceanogràfic
Félix Candela's last design opened on 12 December 2002, five years after his death: the largest aquarium in Europe, 110,000 square metres and 42 million litres of water, with more than 500 species, from belugas and walruses to sharks and rays, in Mediterranean, Arctic, Antarctic, wetland, tropical and Red Sea zones. The roof of the entrance building is a thin concrete shell in the shape of a water lily.
Cost, Cracks and Courts, 2005-2014
A budget that quadrupled, three towers that were never built, a roof skin that came off in the wind, and the architect in court against his critics.
Three Towers That Never Rose
In 2005 Calatrava proposed crowning the complex with three sculptural towers of 308, 266 and 220 metres, one for each provincial capital of the region: Valencia, Alicante and Castellón. Building them was expected to take more than twenty years. The project was put on hold and has not been built.
The Opera House
Queen Sofía inaugurated the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía on 8 October 2005, the eve of Valencian Community Day. At 75 metres it is the tallest opera house in the world: four auditoriums under two laminated steel shells weighing more than 3,000 tonnes, topped by a 230-metre metal plume and clad in trencadís, the broken ceramic mosaic used across the whole site. It cost €478 million, about four times its budget.
Montolivet Bridge
A bridge in two halves: a straight northern span by the engineer José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez, who died in 2000, joined to a curved southern span on white arched supports by Calatrava. It carries the road between the opera house and L'Hemisfèric.
Assut de l'Or, the City's Highest Point
A white cable-stayed bridge hung from a single curved pylon, crossing the dry riverbed between the science museum and the site of L'Àgora. The pylon is 125 metres high, the highest point in Valencia. The communications tower planned in 1991 would have been nearly three times as tall.
L'Àgora Completes the Complex
The last building, a covered plaza for concerts, congresses and sport, was finished in 2009 and hosted the Valencia Open 500 tennis tournament. Construction had run for thirteen years. The final cost of the complex was put at €1,200 million, four times the 1991 estimate.
The Bill Comes Due
On 19 June 2012 El País set out the arithmetic. Three buildings costed at €300 million in 1991 had become a complex of €1,200 million; the 1996 expansion alone had added about €800 million. Asked about fees reported at around €100 million, Calatrava told the paper he considered them "even modest".
A Star Architect Collects Critics
On 25 September 2013 the New York Times put Calatrava's unhappy clients on its front page. In Valencia the left-wing coalition Esquerra Unida was already running a website that catalogued the overruns under a pun on his name, Calatrava te la clava, roughly "Calatrava rips you off". It passed a million visits.
The Roof Comes Off
In late December 2013 the trencadís on the opera house shell, which had begun to wrinkle a year earlier, started coming away in the wind. The building closed and performances were cancelled. On 8 January the regional economy minister, Máximo Buch, reported that 60 per cent of the covering was loose and all of it would have to come off, at a cost of about €3 million, €1.1 million of it already spent on emergency work.
Calatrava Sues His Critics
Calatrava sued Esquerra Unida for damage to his honour, asking for at least €600,000 and the closure of the website, which he blamed for the loss of a bridge contract in Brazil. On 15 May 2014 a Valencia court ordered the domain shut and awarded him €30,000. According to the party, the judge accepted its documented criticism and objected only to the title. It moved the site to a new address: calatravanonoscalla.com, "Calatrava won't shut us up".
The Builders Pay for the Roof
In September 2014 the regional government reached an agreement with Calatrava and the contractors, a joint venture of Dragados and Acciona. They would cover the earlier repair work, strip the steel shell, prime it and lay new trencadís with a different adhesive and an elastic mortar, pay about €232,000 for the cancelled production of Manon Lescaut, and guarantee the new covering for ten years.
A Global Icon, 2015-today
Film and television crews arrive, the Àgora finally gets a use, and the complex starts to pay its way in visitors.
Hollywood's Future City
Disney's Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney, opened on 22 May 2015. The exterior shots of its city of the future were filmed around the complex, which has been cast as the future in one production after another since.
Doctor Who Lands
The BBC filmed the Doctor Who episode "Smile" here in 2016. It aired on 22 April 2017, with the complex standing in for a human colony on a distant planet.
€113 Million a Year
In May 2019 Levante-EMV reported that the complex added €113 million a year to GDP and sustained 3,509 jobs. In 2007 a public vote had named it one of the 12 Treasures of Spain.
Westworld's Headquarters
HBO's Westworld used the complex as the headquarters of the Delos corporation in its third season, which premiered on 15 March 2020. The same year it was a set for the television adaptation of Brave New World, a 2039 World's Fair in Cosmos: Possible Worlds, and, as a green-screen backdrop, the year 2720 in Bill & Ted Face the Music.
CaixaForum Opens Inside L'Àgora
For more than a decade the Àgora was a spectacular building without a steady use. After four years of works and an investment of about €19 million, CaixaForum València opened inside it on 22 June 2022, with 6,500 square metres of galleries.
Coruscant in Valencia
The second season of the Star Wars series Andor, filmed here in 2023 and released on 22 April 2025, used the complex for the planet Coruscant. The year before, MiSaMo, a sub-unit of the K-pop group Twice, shot part of the video for Identity here.
A New Museum Inside the Museum
In February 2026 CACSA gave notice of a tender to buy a new permanent exhibition for the Museu de les Ciències, twenty-five years after the museum opened. The summer programme that followed included ¡Bailar! El arte de moverse, an interactive exhibition shown in Spain for the first time, and eight large marble, steel and granite sculptures by Park Eun Sun on the free outdoor promenades.
The Eclipse Summer
On 12 August 2026 a total solar eclipse crossed Spain, the first visible from the Iberian peninsula in more than a century. For weeks beforehand the science museum gave a pair of safe viewing glasses with every ticket, and its astrophotography contest, AstroCiutat, now in its third year, was given over entirely to eclipses, with €4,500 in prizes. Entries closed on 13 September; the winners are due on 30 September.