Gulliver gets a facelift: Valencia's 'giant' Lilliput park set for full revamp
Friday, November 12, 2021 @ 5:11 PM
Valencia's world-famous 'Gulliver Park' is undergoing a massive overhaul, meaning it will be shut until late next year – but the city council promises it will be worth the wait.
And it's completely necessary, explain local authorities, given that the park's overwhelming popularity since it was unveiled in December 1990 means the structures have become worn out.
Fallen giant: An aerial view of what Valencia's Gulliver Park looks like now. The next two pictures show a close-up of Gulliver's legs and head, and pictures four and five give a virtual mock-up of the new peripheral ‘green’ areas outside the main ring (all photos by Valencia city council)
After all, the first children who ever climbed on it would be aged approximately in their mid-30s or even pushing 40 now.
This fairytale creation is based in the huge botanical gardens that were created in the bed of the river Túria, which once curved around half of the city centre but was diverted away from the urban hub after the 'Great Flood of 1957', when it burst its banks and filled houses up to 1.5 to two metres (at least five or six feet) deep in water.
The highly-novel idea of turning the now-dry river into a botanical garden and one of Europe's largest inner-city 'green lungs' was not only championed across the region, but residents elsewhere started calling for their own dry riverbeds to be turned into parkland.
Much of the Túria Gardens are simply grassland with footpaths and cycle lanes, although part of it is home to the BioParc, an open-air safari centre with such a high standard of living for wild animals that the globally-acclaimed chimp expert Dr Jane Goodall has heaped praise upon it.
Starting at the Serrano 'twin towers' in the city centre, which used to be one of the gateways into Valencia through its boundary walls, and ending at the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias ('City of Arts and Sciences', or CAC), a beautiful and futuristic complex you can read more about here, the Túria Garden is also home to an outpost of Lilliput.
Read full article at thinkSPAIN.com