Architectura

Karen and I have fallen into lazy habits. We get up late, lounge around the apartment, reading and wasting time, and don’t typically get out of the house until after lunch. Today, it was almost two. Shameful!

Yesterday, Karen was suffering with the family cold (I’m now, thankfully, on the mend), and we only got out for a short walk, and even later in the day. We went over to MuVIM, a few blocks away. It’s a museum devoted to illustrative arts that we quite liked when we were here last time. We found it this day, unexpectedly, closed.  We feared it might have closed permanently. The city, like the country, has had some financial difficulties. 

Part of a display of remnants of Roman buildings in MuVIM grounds

We were especially concerned because the banners on the front of the building were for exhibits from last year that had been “progrogued” (prorogrado), according to stickers across the bottom, which we took to mean shut down, like our parliament a couple of years ago. But it apparently also means “extended.” So at this point, we don’t really know if the exhibits were cancelled or extended. The good news is, the museum was only closed yesterday, and for a few more days, while they put up new exhibits. They start Feb 11. Good show! 

Strange fruit: vaguely woman shaped modern sculpture in grounds of MuVIM

From there, we wandered into the centro, the downtown area, on the other side of MuVIM from our apartment, along small streets and alleyways, mostly deserted because it was Sunday and siesta time. We somehow worked back to the main drag near our apartment, Carrer de Guillem de Castro (that’s the Valencian dialect – it’s Calle de Guillem de Castro in Spanish). We were momentarily confused about directions, which is easy to do in this city because the streets go off in all directions. 

Street art near centro

We walked on down to the central train station, Estació del Nord (in Valencian – Estacion del Norte in Spanish) and walked through it, out the other side and along a street that is probably the epicentre of Valencia’s tiny (but growing, we think) Chinatown. Karen spotted one restaurant advertising our favourite, pot stickers. Yum yum. There were decorations up for Chinese New Year. And so home.

Today, Karen was feeling a bit better and we decided to bike down to the City of Arts and Sciences, the entertainment and museum complex at the end of the Rio Turia park system near the sea. It’s a fantastic place, an architectural wonderland, designed by two Spanish architects, Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela. A project partly funded by the regional and city governments, it opened in 1998. As fantastic as the architecture is, and it really makes you look at architecture differently, it is also, apparently, a byword here for government overspending. The original cost estimate for the project was €350 million. It ended up costing, at least according to the estimates of opposition politicians, over €1 billion. 

No matter, it’s a fabuous place. I love trying, none too successfully so far, to get interesting photos of the place. Even the undersides of nearby bridges (over the Rio Turia park system) are architectural marvels. (See pics.)

We walked back toward the centre and home along the Rio Turia park, the Jardines del Turia (the Turia gardens), and then up Gran Via del Marqués del Túria, a broad boulevard, running from the river to the centre of town. Along the way, we admired architecture from an earlier period, including Edificio Chapa, an ornate apartment building that I photographed earlier in the week, and the even more ornate modernista masterpiece, the Ortega House. (See below.)

So all and all, a tour of some of the best architecture Valencia has to offer.