Old Valencia Women’s Prison

The former Valencia Women’s Prison is a building located between Paseo de la Petxina and Calle Castan Tobeñas. Currently, it is the 9 d’Octubre School.
The project is by José María Belda, one of the most important architects of the last third of the s. XIX and that he built most of the public buildings of the period. The most important of them all is that of the Model Prison.

Its construction began in 1889, on a square plot of more than 200 m on the side, located beyond the alignments of the Eixample, and was declared completed in 1901. Built under the functional panopticon scheme, enclosed by a perimeter wall with a guardhouse on all four corners, which based its effectiveness on the isolation of the prisoner who, even in his walks in the courtyard, is deprived of communication with the rest of the inmates.

The building was created following the trend of the time of architecture and functionalism, in which Joaquín María Belda adopted a prison system developed in Philadelphia (Cherry Hill), in 1825, with a radial system. This non-modular building typology, in which the surveillance function prevails, has good examples throughout the nineteenth century, throughout the world.

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