Palacio de la Música
Concert hall whose two great auditoriums went dark for years after a ceiling collapsed onto the empty seats.
This guide to the Palacio de la Musica in Valencia opens on a quiet Saturday in June 2019, when part of the ceiling above the empty seats in the Sala Joaquin Rodrigo simply gave way, with no concert underway and no one hurt. It reaches back to the hall's troubled 1987 opening, when its budget ballooned far past plan even with government help, and to architect Jose Maria Garcia de Paredes, chosen because he understood acoustics better than almost anyone in Spain. Months before the ceiling gave way, heavy rain had already torn an acoustic shell loose inside the Iturbi hall, while the orchestra you would expect to hear kept performing elsewhere across the city.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.