Where centuries collide in colour...

In Valencia’s former Jewish quarter, where medieval walls once divided Christian and Jewish neighbourhoods, stands one of Europe’s boldest cultural transformations. The Hortensia Herrero Art Centre is located in the Palacio de Valeriola, a 17th-century Baroque palace that had fallen into ruin and briefly served as Valencia’s priciest nightclub in the 1980s. “It was full of velvet curtains, candles, and perfume,” says guide Elena Navarro Arro, gesturing to the restored ceilings. “And it was nearly in ruins.”

The palace now houses works by more than 50 contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Tomás Saraceno, Jaume Plensa, Olafur Eliasson, Sean Scully, and Mat Collishaw. The Hortensia Herrero Foundation, led by the vice president of Spain’s grocery giant Mercadona, purchased the decaying palace in 2016. Herrero poured €40 million and five years into its restoration, transforming it into a cultural phoenix that honours every era it has survived. “We are inside what once was the Jewish border,” Navarro notes, standing in the former home of the Valeriola family, Jewish merchants who converted to Christianity in the 16th century. The palace’s magic lies in how its seven site-specific installations converse with its architecture and layered past. In the main hall, Tomás Saraceno’s ‘Cloud Cities’ suspends iridescent glass forms above the central elevator shaft. “When the light touches them, colours change with the time of day,” says Navarro, as rainbow reflections dance across centuries-old stone. Nearby, Jaume Plensa’s monumental sculpture — formed entirely from Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese letters of the alphabet — becomes what Navarro calls “the belly button of the museum,” a symbol of cultural unity.

The most visceral encounter waits in the noble room, where Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Walhalla’ dominates: a massive slab of lead, 280 x 380 x 38 cm and weighing 650 kilograms.

“He first painted a traditional canvas, then poured molten lead over it,” Navarro explains. The violent transformation echoes Kiefer’s postwar origins — his birthplace, Donaueschingen, was bombed in 1945. Too large for the doors, the sculpture was brought in through a wall, sealing a balcony forever. “It’s forever here,” Navarro says.

Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Tunnel for Unfolding Time’ turns perception itself into a medium. Visitors walk through a corridor of 1,035 glass panels glowing in rainbow light — until a turn of the head makes them go black. It’s a meditation on how time and memory shift as we move through them.

Elsewhere, optical and kinetic works invite movement and play. Jesús Rafael Soto’s rods merge and shimmer with the background as visitors move, while Iván Navarro’s ‘Strike’ mirrors a tunnel into infinity, reflecting both the viewer and the artist’s own confrontation with dictatorship.

The palace’s restored 18th-century chapel holds Sean Scully’s abstract stained glass, glowing softly beneath ceiling paintings by a 17-year-old Joaquín Sorolla, created in 1881 as payment for art supplies. The top floor, the Andana, retains its rustic wooden beams and storage feel, while the Torre Miramar recalls the merchants’ vantage point over the Mediterranean. “They watched ships arrive from up there,” Navarro notes.

The collection stretches across continents and centuries, from Anish Kapoor’s dizzying concave mirror to El Anatsui’s monumental tapestry made from liquor bottle caps, a shimmering critique of colonialism and consumption.

In the center’s second building, digital art takes over. TeamLab’s interactive installation creates a virtual village that mirrors Valencia’s real-time weather and seasons. Digital inhabitants respond to touch; if treated violently, they perish.

“If visitors persist, there will be a massacre,” Navarro explains. “After that, only nature returns; people never appear again.” Down in the basement, history and illusion meet. Mat Collishaw’s ‘Left in Dust’ suspends holographic horses mid-gallop over excavated bones from Valencia’s Roman circus — a ghostly resurrection of ancient speed and spectacle. Just steps away lie real fragments of the city’s past: the curved wall of a medieval Jewish alley, soot-stained ovens, the calm geometry of an Islamic fountain.

Here, time doesn’t pass; it circles.