Living near the City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia: a neighborhood guide

Living in Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències

Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (play_arrow) is a barrio of the Quatre Carreres district, in the south-east of Valencia. Its Valencian name is the official one, which the Ajuntament's statistics write Ciutat de les Arts i de les Ciències; in Castilian it is Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. It is a triangle between the Turia garden to the north-east, the Ronda Sud to the south-east and the Avinguda de l'Alcalde Gisbert Rico to the west. It borders Penya-roja in Camins al Grau to the north, La Punta to the south-east, and Na Rovella and a corner of La Fonteta de Sant Lluís to the west.

The barrio is named after the complex at its heart, the City of Arts and Sciences, designed by the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava and built from the 1990s into the early 2000s; the shell roofs of the Oceanogràfic are the work of Félix Candela. Before that this was huerta crossed by the Carrera del Riu, one of the four old roads that gave Quatre Carreres its name, and by the Séquia de Rovella.

According to the Ajuntament's municipal register, 9,507 people lived here on 1 January 2025, on 98.9 hectares. The register's series for the barrio starts in 2015, when it had 6,402, so the population has grown by almost half in ten years as new residential towers went up. Besides the complex (the Palau de les Arts, the Hemisfèric, the Science Museum, the Umbracle, the Àgora and the Oceanogràfic), the barrio holds the Ciutat de la Justícia, the city's main courts building, and the El Saler shopping centre.

Transport and trade-offs: tram-train line 10 stops at Ciutat Arts i Ciències-Justícia and Oceanogràfic, and the Turia garden is a flat ride or walk to the centre. Flats are newer and many buildings have pools and gardens, but rents are among the highest in the district, the wide avenues are built for cars, and tourists fill the complex at weekends. Na Rovella lies to the west, and La Punta to the south-east.