The City of Arts and Sciences is an architectural, cultural and entertainment complex in the city of Valencia (Spain).

The complex was designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela, together with the engineers Alberto Domingo and Carlos Lázaro, who designed the structural design of the roofs of L'Oceanografic, and was inaugurated on 9 June 1998 with the opening of El Hemisférico. The last major component of the City is the Agora, located between the l'Assut de l'Or bridge and the Oceanogràfic.

The City of Arts and Sciences is located at the end of the old Turia riverbed (Jardín del Turia), a riverbed that became a garden in the 1980s, after the river was diverted by the great flood of Valencia in 1957. In 2007, it was one of the winners of the 12 Treasures of Spain competition.

In 1989, the then president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Joan Lerma, after a visit to the new Cité des sciences et l'industrie, in Paris, and through the then director general of planning and studies of the Presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana, Dr. José María Bernabé, officially commissioned the scientist Dr. Antonio Ten Ros, to draw up a first proposal for a City of Science and Technology for Valencia.

Dr. Ten Ros drew up a first draft project, entitled "Vilanova, A Science City for Valencia", which was officially presented to the Generalitat in May 1989. After this, in 1990, he was formally entrusted with the direction of the drafting of a general preliminary project, for an amount of 92,650,000 pesetas (556,000 euros), to be managed by the University of Valencia. Antonio Ten Ros put together a team of 56 scientists, museologists and designers, including Prof. José María López Piñero as the person in charge of the space "A walk through history", who presented the preliminary project, in 32 volumes, to President Lerma, in the Palace of the Generalitat, on 21 December 1991.

The museum was to be the centre around which a complex would revolve, half cultural, half tourist, which was to serve to "make Valencia an emblematic place", as Lerma himself said at the presentation of the works, two years later. The City of Sciences, which was the name given to the initiative by the regional government, consisted of a communications tower 382 metres high - the third highest in the world at that time -, an IMAX cinema, with a planetarium, for which the then director of "La Géode" in Paris, Armand Benatar, and the scientific museum were integrated into Prof. Ten Ros's team. The total cost of the work was estimated at 20,000 million pesetas, about 120 million euros.

In May 1991, the Consell approved the transfer of the land. The Director General of the Presidency, José María Bernabé, who was also responsible for a telecommunications tower to be located on land in Paterna, commissioned to the architect Santiago Calatrava, proposed him as the architectural designer of both projects, which were to be united in the urban space of "Las Moreras". At the end of that year, he gave the green light to the constitution of VACICO S.A., the public company that would manage the project as a whole. Discrepancies in the conception and functionality of the exhibition spaces led Dr. Ten Ros to withdraw from the project in May 1993. Work began at the end of 1994. Once both projects had been integrated under the supervision of Santiago Calatrava, and without any other project content, the architectural and urban planning projects for the Las Moreras space were approved.

With the works awarded and the foundations of the tower built, the PP took over the Generalitat and soon stopped the project. José Luis Olivas, Minister of Economy and Finance, ordered the works to be halted and announced that the regional government would redesign the City of Sciences "with a different philosophy". After four months of bitter controversy, the regional government decided to take up Santiago Calatrava's project again, although not the communications tower, where a large water fountain, christened "el chorrito" by some of the media, would be located. Finally, after the controversy, it was cancelled.

The redefinition of the complex added art to science to form the City of Arts and Sciences, which kept two of the buildings planned by the Lerma government (the science museum and the IMAX cinema with planetarium), replaced the icon of the socialist initiative - the tower - with an opera house and added a new element: an oceanographic park (l'Oceanogràfic). Calatrava redesigned his initial work and, on 20 June 1996, he presented his second project, in which he would be in charge of the design of three of the buildings: L'Hemisfèric in the shape of a human eye, the Palace of the Arts, and the Science Museum. The Spanish-Mexican Félix Candela, one of the Valencian architect's masters, was to design L'Oceanogràfic. After two years of stoppage, work was resumed in 1997, and the engineers Alberto Domingo and Carlos Lázaro, the authors of the structural design of the roof of the L'Oceanografic's Submarine Restaurant, completed the work.

In April 1998, L'Hemisfèric opened its doors to the public. Eleven months later, on the eve of an election, President Eduardo Zaplana inaugurated the Príncipe Felipe Science Museum, although the works were not finished. The museum opened to the public twenty months later. On 12 December 2002, L'Oceanogràfic, the largest aquarium built in Europe, was opened. And on 8 October 2005, the total work was completed with the opening of the Reina Sofía Palace of the Arts, which lost its initial status as the home of the Valencian Film Library to become the opera house of Valencia.