The City of Arts and Sciences is situated at the southeast end of the former riverbed of the river Turia, which was drained and rerouted after a catastrophic flood in 1957.

Designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela, the project began the first stages of construction in July 1996, and was inaugurated on 16 April 1998 with the opening of L'Hemisfèric.

[2] The complex is made up of the following buildings and structures, presented in the order of their inauguration: In 1989, the president of the Valencian Autonomous Government, Joan Lerma, after a visit to the new Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, and through the general director of planning and studies of the Presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana, José María Bernabé, officially commissioned the scientist Antonio Ten Ros to draft a first proposal for a City of Science and Technology for Valencia.

Antonio Ten Ros assembled a team of 56 scientists, museologists and designers including Professor José María López Piñero as responsible for the space "A walk through history".

Four months later the project plan with three structures (communications tower, planetarium, and a science museum) was presented, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

The Conservative Popular Party saw in the City of Science a "work of the pharaohs" that would serve only to swell the ego of the Socialists, who were the driving forces behind the initiative.

However, several successive Popular Party governments continued and expanded the complex far beyond the original Socialist project at an enormous cost, heavily indebting the city.

[8][9] After a change of government in 1996, the planned telecommunication tower was cancelled and replaced by an opera house,[10] which was more expensive, and architect Félix Candela was added to design an oceanographic park,[11] all of which led to underspecified increases in the project budget and to updating the name to City of Arts and Sciences.

Eleven months later, the President of Valencia, Eduardo Zaplana, inaugurated the Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe, although the museum was not yet finished.

He attended the Art Academy in Valencia in the mid-1960s; then he earned a degree in architecture and a postgraduate course in city planning at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, studied civil engineering at the Federal Polytechnic University of Zurich, and participated in academic research investigating the foldability of space frames.

[17] In 2016 (broadcast in 2017) it was used as a filming location for the British science-fiction television programme Doctor Who, appearing in the second episode of the tenth series, "Smile".

Architectural elements from the site were used as a green screen backdrop for the futuristic 2720 city in the 2020 film Bill & Ted Face the Music[20] It's also used as the set of the 2020 television adaptation of Brave New World.

[21] In 2024, MiSaMo, a sub-unit of K-pop girl group Twice, filmed parts of the Identity music video on YouTube at the City of Arts and Science.