Gulliver Park Valencia: The Story Behind the Giant in the Turia
Everyone who has spent time in Valencia knows Gulliver. You have probably walked past him, cycled past him, or watched children scramble over him on a Sunday afternoon. He is one of those landmarks of city life that you stop really seeing after a while. Which is a shame — because the story of how he ended up lying in the Turia is one of the best in Valencia.
A crazy idea.
In 1986, Valencia’s municipal architect Rafael Rivera was commissioned to design a playground for the new Turia Garden. He had a clear conviction: no catalogues of swings and see-saws. He wanted the play elements to be inseparable from the structure itself — built into it, hidden inside it.
He landed on Gulliver almost immediately. A giant, by definition, is the right scale. The problem was finding someone to build it. Every sculptor he approached turned the commission down — the scale was too daunting.
A friend offered the solution: “Rafael, only a fallero can do this.”
The creative trio
Manolo Martín López was one of Valencia’s most celebrated Fallas artists. Valencian comic illustrator Sento Llobell joined the team as the third member, and his contribution turned out to be decisive. The first version of the figure, Rivera and Martín felt, looked too dismal — too realistic, too grim. Llobell’s comic-book line gave the figure warmth and clarity, and crucially, his drawing style solved a technical problem: the folds of Gulliver’s clothing became natural ramps and slides. Form and function, resolved in a single stroke.
Llobell has since described the project as the most beautiful of his career. “I have a work of art on Google Maps,” he said in an interview. “How many people can say that, eh?”
The figure was built using the same techniques Martín applied to Fallas monuments: a timber framework on the inside, coated in layers of polyester, fibreglass and sprayed concrete — chosen for lightness, durability, and feasibility. More than a hundred craftspeople across six or seven workshops in Valencia’s Ciudad del Artista Fallero worked on it.
The whole project — named Un riu de xiquets, a river of children — cost 220 million pesetas, roughly €1.3 million in today’s money. Gulliver was inaugurated on 29 December 1990. It has welcomed around one million visitors every year since.
What most visitors never see
Here is the part that even regular visitors tend to miss. There is a door in Gulliver’s body — discreet enough that most people walk straight past it — that leads inside the figure. Once a year, during Valencia’s Open House festival, architect Rafael Rivera himself leads small groups of fifteen people through the interior.
It is, by all accounts, a strange and wonderful experience. You enter the chest, which functions as a central gathering space — dense layers of sprayed concrete overhead, the sounds of children playing muffled above you, the whole thing lit like a cave. From there Rivera guides the group through an underground anatomy lesson: the elbow, the arms, both legs. The right leg narrows as you approach the foot until it becomes a tight funnel at the tip of the boot — those brave enough to crouch all the way down can touch the inside of Gulliver’s toe.
Rivera has been leading these tours for years, partly to check on the structure. “For 33 years of life,” he said on one occasion, “I think it’s in very good shape.“
Children and adults can confirm it. It is indeed (in) the best shape.
A fascinating set of pictures from inside can be found here
And more fun parks to go with kiddos in Valencia here!
