Prince Felipe Science Museum – Our Visit

Post author:mpowell
Post published:April 27, 2009
Post category:Museums / Photography / Things to Do
Post comments:5 Comments

One of the largest buildings in Valencia’s insane City of Arts & Sciences is the Prince Felipe Science Museum. Like many science museums, this is designed for kids, offering a lot of hands-on activities.

Too bad it sucks.

Our visit to the science museum was one of the more disappointing experiences we’ve had since moving here. Generally, both Juergen and I are big fans of such museums, but the Prince Felipe just utterly failed to impress us.

The main problem was that roughly half of the “hands-on” exhibits didn’t work. Simply broken. Have they absolutely no maintenance budget? It was pathetic. Machines were turned off, “under repair” stickers everywhere. One crazy device, which I think was just trying to weigh me, crashed as soon as I stepped up to it, Windows 95 operating system flickering into blackness.

The exhibits were old-school, stuff you’ve seen a million times before, presented in a cold and uninteresting manner. Juergen looked at how marijuana affects your brain: Flashing lights, spooky images, psychedelic music and misinformation which could have come straight out of brochures from 1983. I stepped onto a “futuristic” board which could roughly sense the direction in which I was leaning. Hey science museum: buy yourself a Wii Fit; seriously, it’s light years more advanced. My bathroom contains devices more interesting than anything this museum had to offer.

The highlight of the museum is Calatrava’s architecture, even more stunning when seen from the inside than the outside.

We also got to see a temporary Marvel Superheroes exhibit, which tried its damnedest to connect the world of comics to science, but was as uninspired & busted as the rest of the museum. “Can you beat Iceman? TOUCH THE ICE!!” Oh wow, it’s cold. That was really it — just touching the ice.

So, unless your kids are really young or particularly easy to impress, we would recommend staying away from this museum. There are plenty of other things for kids to do in the city — such as Gulliver’s park, which is free.