Jardines del Túria: free audio guide
The story of Jardines del Túria in Valencia, as the Votura app tells it on location. Read it here, or hear it on the spot with turn-by-turn walking directions.
Before you go
- Address
- Av. Manuel de Falla, s/n, València Comunitat Valenciana
The story
Turia Gardens (Jardines del Túria) is València’s most astonishing urban landscape, a 9-kilometre-long green ribbon that follows the former riverbed of the Turia River through the heart of the city. The transformation begins after the catastrophic flood of 14 October 1957, when the Turia spills across València and kills at least 81 people, prompting one of Spain’s most ambitious city-making decisions. The old river course is then diverted southward by the Plan Sur, and the dry channel is saved from becoming a highway. Instead, it becomes the park that residents and visitors know today, a linear space that stretches from the western edge of the city to the City of Arts and Sciences.
What makes the gardens so remarkable is that they are not a single designed estate but a stitched-together landscape of bridges, sports areas, sculpture, lawns, and tree-lined paths. The route passes beneath historic crossings such as the 16th-century Puente de Serranos and the 15th-century Puente de la Trinidad, so you walk through a corridor where medieval stone and modern recreation meet at every turn. The park also frames major civic landmarks, including the towers of Serranos, the Palau de la Música, and the futuristic buildings at the eastern end. In practical terms, this is both a park and a spine of the city, threading together neighbourhoods that once faced a river and now face a shared public garden.
The Turia Gardens are famous for their sheer scale and for the amount of public life they absorb. Cyclists, runners, families, and school groups all use the long, mostly car-free route, while football pitches, playgrounds, and open lawns make the space feel more like a green metropolis than a formal park. One of its best-known features is Gulliver Park, a huge playable sculpture inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where children climb over a giant reclining figure rather than merely look at it. Another landmark inside the gardens is the Palau de la Música, opened in 1987, which gives the park a serious cultural anchor beyond sport and leisure.
The eastern end of the park connects directly with one of València’s defining contemporary projects, the City of Arts and Sciences, whose construction begins in 1998 on the former river edge. That means the gardens do something rare: they carry the city from its medieval centre to its late-20th-century skyline without a break in green space. Along the way, the old riverbed also serves as a place for major public events, including the running and cycling routes used by local competitions and city festivals. Because the park is free, centrally located, and enormous, it becomes one of the clearest ways to understand how València reimagines a disaster zone as civic pride.
For tourists, the appeal is not just beauty but narrative: every bridge, path, and sports field belongs to a story about flood, engineering, and reinvention. The name still remembers the Turia River, but the place itself belongs to a city that refuses to leave a scar empty. Walk it from west to east, and you trace roughly 9 kilometres of València’s history in one continuous line, from older stone bridges to the striking modern towers near the Mediterranean side. That combination of scale, memory, and daily use is what makes Jardines del Túria one of València’s most memorable places to explore.
Written for the Votura audio tour and read aloud in the app. Opening hours change, so check with the venue before you go.
Self-guided tours that stop at Jardines del Túria
- Валенсия за 2 дня на автомобиле: топ-12 достопримечательностей города
- Valencia After Dark: Ruzafa, El Carmen & Neon Nights
More audio tours in Valencia →
Hear it on the spot
Votura plays this guide when you reach Jardines del Túria, then walks you to the next stop. Works offline.