The City of Arts and Sciences is built on the bed of the Turia. It is not that the river has volatilized, or that the Valencians went crazy and spent 1,282 million euros on a complex so that it would be submerged at the first downpour. Since 1973, the main channel no longer runs through the center of the city, but by a detour to the south of it.
It was the solution adopted after the 1957 flood, which flooded half of Valencia and killed more than a hundred people. It took a catastrophe for the authorities to take action, but the truth is that it had been years in sight, or perhaps even centuries.
For two thousand years, the Turia was the main source of life in the region, and this is what explains why it is one of the most densely populated on the peninsula. In Roman times, what is now the Plaza de la Virgen was a fluvial island, strategically located along the route of the Via Augusta (Hispania's main road). For this reason, the consul Décimo Junio Bruto Galaico (c. 180-113 BC) thought that they were good lands to give to his legionaries, who deserved a reward for having subdued the Lusitanians in northern Portugal.
It served them for irrigation and trade, but every so often the river overflowed, bogging down the outskirts of Valentia. It was not until the arrival of the Arabs, already in medieval times, when that was solved. Great connoisseurs of hydraulics, they built weirs, dams and ditches, taking the water where they wanted. This is how the Huerta de Valencia was born, a green spot in the Spanish Levante planted with tiger nuts, rice and a variety of vegetables.
However, and the Valencians have learned this by force, there is no human ingenuity that can always appease the indomitable nature of the Turia. Since the foundation of the city in 138 a. C., there are fifty large floods documented. They happen whenever extraordinary rains occur in the upper parts of the basin, which is why in Levante the term "cold drop" is synonymous with catastrophe.
Naturally, all the water that fell into the basin was collected by the river and ended up in Valencia. The Englishman Richard Ford, a traveler and explorer who toured the Spain of Ferdinand VII, did not know anything about this, which is why he was so surprised to see the city's bridges. They seemed very long and very robust, too much for the derisory usual course.
They could already be long, because with each avenue the bed was covered from side to side... at least. Given this, in the fourteenth century the two banks were covered with a large stone wall.
The parapets functioned for five hundred years, but in October 1957 the water passed over them as if nothing had happened. Not because it rained a lot, which also, but because of another problem, common to all cities that sit on a floodplain.
For centuries, sediment carried by the water accumulated there, raising the bed dangerously close to the level of the streets. This is clearly seen on the road over the Puente del Real, which descends when entering the Plaza de Tetuán: the bridge is higher than the street.
It was like being under the sword of Damocles. Already in 1949, a large avenue swept away the shacks that the immigrants had improvised on both sides of the valley, killing 41 of them. The council forbade adding settlements to the area, and little else. Nobody expected what would happen eight years later, especially because that October 13 it hardly rained in the capital.
Inland, on the other hand, it was pouring all day. At 9:00 p.m., an employee of the Pedralba hydroelectric plant telephoned the Civil Government: “The river is coming very strong. It is spreading over the orchards, it reaches the population and it has a fury never seen before. This is serious".
The call came so late because of the precariousness of the telephone installation – the company used an abandoned telephone from the Civil War – and because the storm had cut many lines. It was already 11 p.m. when the Civil Guard, the local police and the night watchmen took to the streets to wake up the neighbors, shouting their heads off and starting with the neighborhoods that, due to their location, would be the most affected. In turn, radio stations interrupted programming to call for evacuation.
In the article "The 'cold drop' of 1957", the specialist Antonio Rivera Nebot takes an X-ray of those first hours. Around one in the morning, the water had already reached the level of the parapets, drowning the slum dwellers who had ignored the 1949 prohibition. The first bridge it crossed is that of Campanar, spilling from there towards the left bank and in the direction of the Tendetes neighborhood. On the right side, he went into the women's prison and the slaughterhouse.
Before it reached their neighborhoods, the residents knew something was wrong when the power and telephones were cut off, the water in the houses lost pressure, and the manhole covers began to fly off.
Then the loud rumor of an unbridled torrent was heard, before a wave that suffocated in minutes the unfortunates who still slept in the basement of the buildings. Around four in the morning it had already flooded everything that surrounds the old town, turning the cathedral and the Plaza de la Virgen into an island, the same one that the Romans occupied in their day. Suddenly, the river had recovered the course it had been two thousand years ago. It is not a coincidence that cities are born in the highest places, and that the cathedral was left dry is the proof.
For the mayor and the governor, it was a harrowing night. Trapped in the Marine Command, they watched as the water washed humanity around them, in the form of furniture, cars and corpses. They were unable to leave until 12 noon, when a truck rescued them.
As soon as they touched dry land they were given the worst news in the world. From upriver they reported that a second wave was coming down towards the city, and it was bigger than the previous one. He overflowed for the same points, but this time he went much further.
Because it happened during the day and with people warned, the second avenue was less deadly, but it ended up demolishing the bridges, houses and factories battered by the first. As for the number of deaths, today the figure of 81 has been imposed, that of the Francoist authorities, but Rivera Nebot believes that they exceeded one hundred.
The reconstruction began immediately, as the government feared that it would take six months, but thanks to the Army it lasted six weeks. A total of 1,120,000 tons of mud were removed.
Now yes, a better solution than the parapets was imposed. It was not easy to obtain the budget, since Spain was coming out of autarky and in 1959 the Stabilization Plan arrived, which began by reducing public spending.
Denouncing this paralysis cost Tomás Trénor Azcárraga, the mayor, his job, but he managed to make the Government feel the pressure and speed things up. A month later, on July 22, 1958, the Council of Ministers approved the excavation of a 12-kilometre canal to divert the Turia through the south of the city. It was the most expensive alternative of those that had been proposed – the cost was estimated at 5,000 million pesetas, although it ended up costing 6,067 – but also the most definitive.
When it was cleared, the old channel became an object of desire on the part of industrialists and real estate speculators, eager to get hold of plots in that great corridor that crossed the city. If it didn't happen, it was because the neighbors organized themselves. Under the slogan "The bed is ours", in 1976 they managed to transfer it to the city council to make a large green space.
At the end of that garden, that is where the government of the socialist Joan Lerma planned to make a scientific, cultural and tourist center at the same time, a plan that the Popular Party would later expand to become the City of Arts and Sciences, inaugurated in late nineties.
Although it is a pole of tourist attraction, there are those who regret that it has become the image of Valencia. Somehow, the rearrangement that followed the flood of 1957 marked the beginning of the end for the city of the orchards and the barracks, the one that Blasco Ibáñez portrayed in his novels. In the last fifty years, two thirds of the Huerta have disappeared, first because of Franco's development, and then because of the real estate boom.
