We’re pretty sure that this area has been used as a Sci-Fi movie set, but can’t place exactly where. If not, it certainly should be. In reality, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia is a vast complex built mostly in the late 1990s (the opera house wasn’t completed until 2005) as a combined park, entertainment and cultural space. It’s situated at the end of the Turia riverbed (the river was rerouted after a flood in 1957) which is now a city park that runs along the north and east sides of the center. The park itself is a fantastic green space with football pitches, a fun fair and kilometers of bike paths crisscrossed by the old bridges originally built over the Turia.
It was pretty wild just to walk around the monumental buildings of the “city” which seems to offer a 1990s vision of the future and could serve as an excellent backdrop for Star Trek or the next Sci-Fi blockbuster.
Must be the future! Hardly a person to be seen, who was that jogger anyway? More seriously, the sculptural architecture creates for me both an optimistic and pessimistic view of the future. I image the costs to the city were huge.