Moving a river: Valencia's radical "Leap to Modernity" and the Gardens of the Turia

Transcript

Welcome to Valencia.

Since its foundation in Roman times, Valencia sat on the banks of the River Turia. But in 1957 the river had a catastrophic flood causing numerous fatalities, and in response, they literally moved the entire river, diverting it completely around the city, and putting its former course to new uses - the vast majority of it, a huge linear park.

This, to me, is wild. As I mentioned way back in my second ever video, most major inland cities tend to sit on rivers, and they usually have an extremely deep cultural bond with them, such that this would be unthinkable. Can you imagine Londoners deciding to pipe the Thames around the M25, or Parisiens filling in the Seine?

That video was about my current home city of Bristol re-routing its own rivers in relatively drastic ways, but I think Valencia's intervention has even got Bristol beat; such a radical reshaping of both the physical and cultural geography of a city was, and still is, almost without parallel in Europe. So although well outside this channel's usual geographical stomping grounds, I thought the story of the Turia was worth a deeper look.

I should probably warn you, that of all the qualifications you'd be looking for in the maker of a mini documentary about Valencian history and urbanism, I possess absolutely none of them. But with that said...

The obvious place to start would be the flood of the 14th October, 1957. After all, I just told you that this natural disaster prompted the intervention in question. And that's mostly true. It was a terrible disaster: officially, 81 people died, but in reality, probably hundreds. At its peak the Turia was flowing at 3,700 m³ per second. For comparison, the mighty Nile typically only discharges about 2,800 m³/s. Some streets were left under 5 metres of water. Thousands of homes and other buildings were destroyed.

But while these tragic events were the proximate cause of the grand plan to move the river, the story actually starts much, much further back. Way back in 1765 a chap called Gómez Marco was promoting a scheme to divert the Turia, and these proposals kept popping up throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Sometimes they would aim to send it south, sometimes north, but either way, the general idea of moving the city's river was so common as to be almost uncontroversial.

It's probably worth pointing out here that a river in this part of Spain is really not the same as a river in Britain or northern Europe generally. With my own bias I'm used to thinking of rivers as vital permanent channels of transport and trade. But here, rainfall patterns mean even relatively major rivers may be mere trickles for much of the year, useless for navigation. Amplifying this, much of the Turia's flow was diverted into the orchard hinterlands of Valencia (the Province) through an ancient system of irrigation channels, meaning even less water generally reached Valencia (the city).

In fact, far from being a conduit for trade, the Turia interfered with it. Its mouth blocked expansion of the Port, and it was blamed for discharging silt and sediment that clogged up the port too. So the Port authorities and commercial interests had been a constant proponent of moving the river throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Consequently, the urban river was mostly neither useful nor beautiful. Nor even, mostly river. Being mostly empty of water, shanty towns housing up to 9000 people sprung up to cover much of the riverbed. Elsewhere, the riverbed was used for horse markets, growing crops, and so on.

A fairly severe flood in 1949 highlighted the dangers of the shanty towns here, and prompted a supposed eviction of them, but governmental wheels move slowly, and as late as 1955 the major Valencian newspaper Las Provincias published a report urging the housing to move to a "better location" to avoid "any flood unforeseen". Ironically, the very existence of reports like this means you definitely cannot say the 1957 disaster was unforeseen.

Meanwhile, the idea of redirecting the river entirely was being resurrected yet again. In 1956 a major 'Rethinking Project' was approved, and then revised and re-approved in May 1957.

But before anything could happen with that, of course, came the tragedy of October 1957, and the political and cultural conversations around the Turia took on a whole new dimension.

It seems fair to conclude that Valencians weren't overwhelmingly in love with their river, beforehand, but now many of them viewed it with fear. Still, I certainly don't mean to suggest the city's dramatic rejection of its river was by unanimous popular demand. Many, indeed, defended the intangible cultural significance of the city's historic waterway, such as José Burguera, acting president of the Community of Irrigators of the Turia River. He organised a petition with thousands of signatures, describing the river as "inseparable from the city", making a similar point to my own intro to this video - that nobody ever dreamt of diverting the Thames, Seine or Danube.

Some, therefore, opposed the drastic intervention every step of the way - or at least every step possible under a fascist dictatorship. This was Franco's era, after all, and Franco had personally visited Valencia 10 days after the flood, making loud public declarations that he would fix everything. His regime would cheerfully censor and suppress criticism of government policy on the Turia issue just as much as it would on any other issue. Nevertheless, it seems fair to conclude the fatal floods shifted local public and political opinion sufficiently in favour of the city's drastic divorce from its river, that one cannot simply chalk up the outcome as Franco railroading through a megalomaniac project against local wishes, either.

In the aftermath of the disaster, three main options were discussed: northern, central and southern. The central solution would have maintained the Turia's traditional course through the city, defending against flood risks by clearing out the channel, perhaps widening it in some places, adding flood control structures, overflow channels and so on. But there was a perception, rightly or wrongly, that this would preserve all of the current disadvantages of the river, whilst not reducing the risk nearly as much as the more radical re-routings. It was also unpopular as it would have required demolishing many historic bridges and riverside buildings.

The northern option was discarded fairly quickly as there was too much existing urbanisation, roads and railways in the way, and so the discourse settled onto Solution Sur. The Southern Solution planned to divert the river around the city in a new channel 12 km long, 200 m wide, with a maximum capacity of 5,000 m³/s, a 35% margin over the 1957 flood.

Apparently, the "Southern Solution presented higher direct and indirect returns derived from the sale of plots, capital gains or the increase in fiscal wealth", and a cynic might wonder if this, rather than popular feeling or hydrological science, was the main reason the southern solution got picked.

But either way, by 1961 the southern solution had become a Southern Plan - encompassing not just the river redirection and associated hydraulic works (channels and reservoirs and dams) but also massively reworking the port, all of the railways, building many new roads, all new sewage infrastructure, industrial estates, and so on. The plan was sold to Valencians as a 'Leap to Modernity'.

This broader plan was clearly about much more than just mitigating the flood risk of the Turia. In the 50's and 60's Valencia was growing fast both demographically and economically, with GDP growth around 10%, way above Spain's national average. As such, you could perhaps argue that ambitious plans for new roads, suburbs, industrial zones and so on would have come anyway: the Turia redirection just offered a hook to hang it all on. The decision to begin the diversion here at Quart de Poblet, for example, was explicitly more one of urban planning than hydrology.

Over the course of several days I walked almost the full length of the former Turia from here at Quart de Poblet, where most of the river's flow seemed to be vanishing underground at this weir, all the way down to the marina. It's safe to say this first part was my least favourite. The new channel is ugly and the pedestrian diversion to get from the metro to the start of the old riverbed on the other side of it, was long and somewhat hostile. The upper reaches of the so called Parc Fluvial aren't very park-like either, seeming to have enjoyed little to no ecological restoration work and vibing slightly of post-industrial wasteland. An old concrete weir lies obsolete and abandoned. A few of these white birds were pretty much all the wildlife I saw.

Ugly as the new channel may be though, building it didn't come cheap. Moving the river came with a price tag of 7 billion pesetas, with the national government paying three quarters, the city of Valencia 20% and the province the final 5%. To pay for it, the city imposed a raft of new taxes and surcharges: a staggering 40% tax on gas and electricity; 15% tax on livestock; 10% on urban wealth; 10% on luxury goods like sweets and perfumes; 3% on hotels and restaurants; 3% on telephone services... Unsurprisingly, these taxes were highly unpopular.

But, like I said, these were authoritarian times, and public opinion could be overruled pretty much at will. My main source describes the scheme as 'technocratic despotism'. Or, well, at least he does via google translate.

So, to cut a long story short, the Turia's southern diversion was built, the major highways lining both sides of the new channel were built, the sprawl of industrial estates lining those roads were built, and the city grew out to meet its new southern barrier, as intended, and sometimes beyond it, as not intended.

But this still left the issue of what to do with the old riverbed in the city itself.

You will probably be unsurprised to hear that one of the early front-running ideas in the late 50s and 60s was to build a ginormous freeway, up to 12 lanes wide, filling the channel. Since you're watching this channel you probably share my relief that this didn't happen.

In the short term, sports fields were one of the first things to colonise the riverbed. This was supposedly temporary while the politicians continued to debate what permanent use the land should have. Within a few years football, rugby, baseball, hockey and athletics were all catered for. By 1974 there were 29 football fields in the former river and this had a clear impact on football in Valencia: between 1969 and 1974 the number of clubs registered grew from 251 to 592. This is still reflected today, with numerous football pitches and other sporting facilities scattered regularly along the park, and very well used they are too.

Speaking of park - today it's mostly all a park. (If the last 10 or 15 minutes of footage hadn't clued you in to that.)

A Bulgarian resident of Valencia saw me filming here and came over to ask if I knew the history of the place. As he put it - the politicians argued for so long about what to do, the trees grew up to their full height of their own accord, so.... voila... park it is, then, I suppose. Perhaps that's not quite the full story, but it's true that the '60s drifted well into the 70s without any sort of decision on what to do with the riverbed materialising. Public opinion in the 1970s certainly swung strongly in favour of a park, with a popular slogan of the time being "The bed of the Turia is ours and we want it green".

Also, the simple fact of the matter was, Valencia desperately needed more public green space. Having historically been a compact city entirely surrounded by rural orchards, it had not felt the need to create big city parks, or even many small to medium ones, come to that. In 1970 there was a miniscule 0.7 m² of green space per inhabitant; turning the entire riverbed into a park would bump that up to 1.5. Doubling it sounds good, but by comparison, the figure was 6 in Madrid, 9 in London, 10 in Barcelona or New York, 11 in Prague. In that context, you can see how making it all a park was almost a necessity, not a luxury.

In 1975 a motion was passed by the municipal Urban Planning Commission with three main points: that all plans for roads and buildings should be scrapped in favour of converting the entire riverbed into green space; that royal assent for this should be given; and that the state should give the city ownership of the land. In 1976 the State duly turned over the old riverbed to Valencia City Council, but, as I said, governmental wheels move slowly, so it was the early 80s before plans for the park really started coalescing.

Ricardo Bofill was hired to masterplan, with the park being divided into different sections, each handled by different architects and landscape designers and delivered in phases across the next decade or two. Some sections show classical influences, alluding to Valencia's Roman foundations, while others are more local in flavour. Some sections are densely planted with trees, other sections are left wide open, like a city forum for events and gatherings. There's varying degrees of formality in the landscape design. And of course there are facilities beyond merely botany and landscape: children's play areas, most prominently this huge Gulliver, or adult outdoor callisthenics zones and the aforementioned sports pitches.

Nevertheless, the riverbed geography gives the park an inherent continuity and coherence. Though far from a constant thread, water features recur often enough to provide a sort of echo of the Turia. Sometimes these take the form of small streams, wandering in a pseudo-naturalistic fashion; other times formalised channels, ponds and fountains in more of a French style; and with several bridges being given large reflecting pools to restore something of their historic visual bridge-y-ness.

Speaking of bridges, regular viewers of the channel will know I'm quite the fan of them, but I think I will spare you systematically breaking down each and every bridge across the former Turia.

Suffice to say they range from the medieval to the modern - Pont de la Trinitat here is the oldest, beginning construction in 1402. Personally I was a big fan of the extra design effort that had clearly gone into some of the modern efforts. Take these tree-shaped supports for this pair of concrete bridges, for example, that were built just over a decade ago. They replaced a wooden bridge, and are still named Pont de Fusta, and this arboreal design is presumably a nod to that. Lovely.

You might also note the high numbers of cyclists in this shot, both on the bridge above and in the park below. The park itself has separate paths for cyclists and e-scooters, walkers, and joggers, and I observed essentially no conflict between them. In general the state of cycling infrastructure in the city streets makes my hometown look like a joke. Although frankly that's not difficult.

Another extremely elegant modern bridge is the Exposition bridge. Designed by Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, with his trademark white ribs, this gracefully clears the river channel in a single 131 metre span. The space below the bridge turns out to be a popular venue for outdoor dance classes, or perhaps just spontaneous dancing - it was hard to be sure. But the bridge isn't soaring over this plaza just to allow space for dance - it's because it's not actually solid ground. There's a metro station under here. These strange sticky out concrete blobs turn out to be providing natural light and ventilation down to the platforms below. The station, too, was designed by Calatrava, and has something of his typical organic, skeletal style to it.

But if it's Calatrava you're after, then this station and bridge are a mere appetiser: continue south through the Turia gardens for just over a mile, and you'll find the simply astonishing main course.

The City of Arts and Sciences is a vast cultural complex that was built during the 90s and 2000s, mostly although not single-handedly designed by Calatrava, and although it might technically sit besides the old riverbed rather than in it, the lines are, at the very least, blurred enough that I can't possibly not mention it in this video.

Personally, I find it ridiculously photogenic, and I came home with such a large amount of footage, I'm inclined to do a separate video all about it. So in this video I'll not go into too much detail on the buildings per se, but suffice to say, in the adjacent sections of the park, the futuristic architectural aesthetic definitely makes its presence felt, adding yet another distinct flavour to this particular section of the former Turia.

The Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts, in particular, is simply enormous. Of course I'd seen photographs of this place before I visited, so I was prepared for its sculptural qualities, but its sheer scale in the flesh was another matter. At 75 metres high, Wikipedia claims it's the tallest opera house in the world. The adjacent Pont de l'Assut de l'Or, at 125m, is apparently the tallest structure in Valencia full stop. I don't want to say they loom over the park, because "loom" sounds a bit negative and threatening, and these structures are too gracefully organic in my eyes to be threatening, but they are undoubtedly very big and very.there. You feel almost like you're in a park on a giant ringworld habitat space-station or something.

Still, as I said, I'll probably do a dedicated video on this place so I'll postpone the debate over whether this is science-fiction utopia or dystopia.

But what of the southern solution overall? With hindsight, was moving the river genius or insanity? Triumph or disaster?

As someone who pulled the "I don't live there myself so it's not my place to judge" card when discussing a suburb a mile down the road from me, I am obviously somewhat nervous about dishing out my own proclamations on such a question, having only visited Valencia for a week. But fence-sitting makes for a poor youtube video, so I'll do my best to offer sort sort of conclusion.

The simplest criteria by which we could judge the project would be its success in averting further fatal floods. But here, the truth is, we just don't know. Valencia has not suffered another similarly deadly flood since 1957, but that's because there hasn't been a comparable rainfall anomaly since 1957. The capacity of the diverted Turia has simply never been tested.

As for the broader outcomes of the project - it seems undeniable to me that the park is, in itself, on the 'triumph' end of things. Other green spaces in the city centre are so small to nonexistent that it's almost impossible to imagine life here without it. And not just tourist life, but very obviously resident life as well. From the youth football teams to the pensioners walking their dog, from the rushing commuters and fitness nuts to relaxing picnics and birthday parties, the sheer rate and diversity of use that I observed, is testament to how vital this place must be to inner-city Valencians.

The Port of Valencia must also be pretty happy with how things turned out. After centuries of trying to get rid of the pesky mouth of the Turia, it finally happened, and you can see from comparing old and modern maps how far the port has expanded in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. This has allowed it to become the 5th biggest container port in Europe, a pretty big tick mark for anyone inclined to assess the costs and benefits of things in purely financial terms. Those kinds of people can also point to the City of Arts and Sciences as contributing another hundred million euros or so of annual economic benefit, too.

It is hard to view the new Turia with much enthusiasm though. The huge concrete corridor it creates with its adjoining motorways, logistics yards, treatment plants, warehouses, bus depots and other ugly industrial sprawl, represents everything about 60s urban planning that youtube armchair urbanists love to hate.

And from an ecological and environmental point of view, it's easy to argue that the southern solution was, and largely still is, a complete disaster. These artificial embankments mean a complete lack of riparian zone, so the new channel is, in itself, terrible in terms of biodiversity and so on. But its very construction also swallowed up hundreds of hectares of farmland which was highly economically productive and at least somewhat biodiverse, and in severing the ancient system of irrigation channels servicing Valencia's orchard hinterlands, it disrupted the ecology of a far wider area.

As you can see, there are still plenty of oranges growing on the fringes of the city, but huge swathes of the southern orchard were deruralised as a result of the southern plan. When a city moves its river, the effects are felt far beyond the city proper.

Anyway, that's all for this video. Particular thanks to Iván Portugués for his doctoral thesis LA METAMORFOSIS DEL RÍO TURIA EN VALENCIA (1897-2016), which was my main source for this video. Needless to say, though, any mistakes in here should be blamed squarely on me - or perhaps google translate.

In the event that any Valencians ended up watching this somehow, apologies once again for mangling your languages and for anything else I got wrong.

Cheers.

Moving a river: Valencia's radical "Leap to Modernity" and the Gardens of the Turia

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