Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía

The Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía looks less like a theatre than a giant white creature resting in a garden of water. Santiago Calatrava designed it as the final great piece of the City of Arts and Sciences, the chain of futuristic buildings laid out along the old bed of the Turia. After a catastrophic flood in 1957 the river was diverted around the city, and its dry channel was turned into a long ribbon of parkland; the opera house stands at the northwestern end of the complex, rising out of shallow pools and walkways.

Its signature is the roof: a curved metallic plume about 230 metres long that arches over the building like a crest or a feather. Beneath it, two enormous steel shells wrap the body of the building, and the whole mass climbs to around 75 metres, often cited as the tallest opera house in the world. The shells are clad in trencadís, the broken-tile mosaic associated with Gaudí, which gives the surface its soft, glittering white. That skin has had a troubled life: by early 2014 the ceramic pieces were coming loose, the mosaic was stripped from the shells, and after about a year of work the trencadís was put back by late 2015.

Inside, fourteen floors above ground and three below hold four separate halls. The main auditorium seats around 1,470 people above one of the largest orchestra pits in the world, big enough for some 120 musicians; a second large hall seats about 1,420, and two smaller rooms of some 400 seats each serve chamber music and smaller productions. The Palau was inaugurated in October 2005 and staged its first opera, Beethoven's Fidelio, in 2006. Lorin Maazel served as its music director, Zubin Mehta led its Mediterranean Festival from 2007, and its resident ensemble is the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana.

Getting there

The Palau stands in the Turia gardens about 3 km from the centre of Valencia. Valencia Airport (VLC) is about 11 km away. The building sits at the end of the City of Arts and Sciences nearest the old town, so it can be reached on foot along the riverbed park, a pleasant walk past the bridges that cross the old channel. Check performance and visiting times before you go.