Spain Diaries: Take me to your leader

Gaining knowledge and losing fluids at the City of Arts and Sciences

It’s all a bit relentless. All of these European towns and cities I’ve visited and it’s just wall-to-wall old towns, cathedrals, food markets. Everywhere I look it’s buildings which have stood for centuries, it’s gothic, neo-gothic, classical, baroque, classical-gothic-neo-baroque. Enough already. What I want is something shiny and new. Something, as one website puts it, “set firmly in the 21st century.”

Luckily I’m in Valencia which has just the place. Anyone who has been to Paris has probably come back inspired to write a novel or a play or to compose their latest concerto. But when Joan Lerma visited in 1989, when he happened to be the president of the Valencian Autonomous Government, he came away with a very different kind of vision.

He had been to see Paris’s City of Science and Industry, and he formed a similar idea for his city. He commissioned two architects and construction began in 1996 on what is now one of the 12 Treasures of Spain. Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences is a multi-million euro collection of eight buildings and structures sitting in the old Turia river bed. It is other-worldly, massive, imposing, as if the aliens that will spell our doom chose this corner of Spain to land their spacecraft and show us who’s boss. It is all a brilliant white colour, blinding in the bright white light of the summer afternoon. It, for some unknowable reason, hides its toilets in the underground car park.

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It’s so hot I feel like I’m walking through honey, or treacle, or the atmosphere of the faraway planet that is very close to the sun that these buildings so obviously belong on. I arrive on the metro and step out of the deliciously cool air-conditioned train into the devil’s armpit of what qualifies as a sunny summer’s day in Spain.

There’s water in the City of Arts and Sciences, a man-made lake, and I’m pulled towards it. It’s a bright turquoise in the afternoon sun and I stagger, sweating and gasping, towards a bench in the shade. It may be in the high thirties and so humid that even if the aliens did land and exit their spaceships here they would immediately turn back around and take off, muttering “Christ, it’s muggy,” as they did so, humanity proves that whatever the environment it is placed in or put amongst, it will always provide an inexhaustible supply of one of its more numerous commodities: morons.

Okay, moron might be a slightly harsh way of describing those who on a day when it feels hot enough to boil an egg in the man-made lakes of the City choose to row boats on them instead, in full view of the fierce and unrelenting sun. But it is a decision that I think calls into question their ability to make good choices. Perhaps I’m just jealous of their ability to retain enough bodily function to move any of their limbs. I’m sheltered under a bridge with an ice cream wondering why I didn’t go somewhere cooler, like Iceland or anywhere in the Arctic Circle.

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As I sit my attention is consistently drawn to the most striking building of the complex, the Museum of Science. For those interested in dimensions, it’s 55 metres tall, 180 feet if you prefer, or, if one is being generous, just over 60 Tom Fish’s. I am just shy of six foot, if I’m being honest, so it’s not quite a perfect equation. But more important than its height is what it’s supposed to look like.

Like all good monumental buildings it’s supposed to resemble the skeleton of a whale, an absolutely fantastic thing to choose to mimic because absolutely no one knows what whale bones look like. Sure you can have a guess, but in heat this oppressive when someone tells you it looks like a whale skeleton you nod weakly and say, sure, does it have a café?

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There’s L'Hemisfèric, a cinema and planetarium, which is meant to look like an eye. This is annoying because at first glance, I thought, hey that looks like a fish. But this one isn’t supposed to look like a whale or anything else that swims, it’s an eye, stupid. It’s a cinema, it’s a planetarium, obviously it’s an eye.

There’s L’Umbracle, a huge series of parabolic arches with gardens and free-standing sculptures. From up here you can lean over and watch the morons rowing their boats in front of the whale skeleton. Or you can stand in the shade of the plants and perspire and question why you booked a flight to Spain in August.

There’s L'Oceanogràfic, an open-air aquatic park I pretend not to visit because of a moral objection to animals being trapped in captivity, being gawped at, etc., etc., even though tonight I will eat not one but two animals in the same dish. I actually don’t visit because it’s nearly forty euro a ticket and the phrase “open-air” doesn’t sound like it goes with the phrase that is fast becoming my favourite here in Spain, “air-conditioning.” If the aquarium has air-con I’ll move in. It’s closer than my hotel and forty euro will fast become a bargain. Screw the marine life.

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I try to visit the Opera House. I don’t suddenly have an urge to listen to something beautiful, I have the urge to pee. The sign says the toilets are in the direction of the Opera House. I walk around it, all around it, which takes a while. No toilets. I try to go up to the main doors and these are shut: there is no opera today so you can’t come in.

I follow more signs back around the Opera House and towards L’Umbracle. About twenty minutes later, during which time I am becoming increasingly desperate to pee and equally, increasingly bewildered that there’s any fluid left within me that wants to make this particular exit, that isn’t already practically spouting from the top of my head or gushing from beneath my arms, I find the toilet.

They’re in the car park under L’Umbracle, because of course they are. This whole complex may have cost hundreds of millions of euros but that doesn’t mean there’s going to be toilets in sensible places. We’re a bit busy making this whale skeleton to worry about your bodily functions, mate.

I practically collapse onto a bench near the water and look up at the Opera House. If the aliens do land now, in Valencia, and ask me to take them to our leader, I won’t have the strength to argue that it isn’t clear just who that is, I’ll take them wherever they want. As long as they don’t need me to explain why anyone would want to row a boat in this heat, or why you’d want to put the public toilets in an underground car park, I’ll be okay.

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Some housekeeping.

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