Valencia's Turia: A Riverbed Turned Into a Park

On 14 October 1957 the Turia flooded Valencia and killed around a hundred people. The river was diverted south of the city — the works finished in 1972 — leaving kilometres of empty riverbed through the middle of town. The plan of the 1960s was to run an urban motorway down it; the new ring road made that idea redundant and the city got a park instead, founded in 1986, and the old channel is now a continuous green corridor with pitches, running tracks, cycle paths and gardens, passing under the historic bridges that no longer cross anything. At the seaward end Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela built the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in the dry bed.