Valencia's New Arts and Science "City"

On Thursday, as well as going to the Lladro factory, we finally made it to the wonderful new and gorgeous Arts and Science "City" (Ciutat de les Arts i de les Ciencies) which has been built in the old river bed/now park area of the city. It consists of 5 magnificent futuristic buildings - four of them designed by a Valencian architect, Santiago Calatrava.  If you have ever seen any pictures of modern Valencia - this would be what is shown. 

Below is a picture is of L' Hermisferic building in the foreground.  It looks like a winking eye or a toppled spaceship (to some of us). 

Behind it is the fabulous Palau de la Arts, which to me looked alot like a shark's head. 

We didn't go into either of these buildings.  The hermispheric is an IMAX theatre and planetarium and the arts building contains 4 separate theatres.  But we sure enjoyed the views from the outside. (I should have been an architect, I think...I just love this stuff.)

All of the buildings are surrounded by lovely clear, clean pools.  They were so inviting it was hard to not jump in at times walking around here.

It is difficult to convey the scale of all these buildings.   The entire "city" probably runs about 1/2 mile.  

Part of the "city" is the parking garage which is a long pergola covered by giant parabolic arches.  At one end of it there is now a robit dinasaur exhibit which just opened. (see pictures below).

 The remaining two buildings in the "city" are the Science Museum and the Oceanographic.  We visited the science museum right then and will visit the other on Monday.   The science museum (pictured below)

was pretty interesting.   It was very hands on and most displays were in several languages, including English.  It was geared more towards school-aged groups but we found much of it interesting.

The one we enjoyed the most was the Star Trek exhibit.  It had an interesting time line of all of the Star Trek movies, as well as models of the ships and lots of costumes.  The videos in this exhibit were also in English with Spanish substitles.

There were lots of props displayed as well as captain's chairs and 'beaming' stations.  Did you know that the transporter was invented to save money?   Since the Enterprise visited a new planet every week, it would have cost too much to mock up landings and take-offs, so the "beam me up" solved the problem.  I didn't know that but I guess you trekkies out there probably did.

Thus ended another wonderful day in Valencia, Spain.