La Fábrica de Hielo

The warehouse that today brings together house sessions, concerts, and vermouths next to the Cabanyal beach was built in 1925 for a different purpose: to manufacture ice and preserve the fleet's fish.

A Marina Auxiliante factory

The property was part of the heritage of the Sociedad Marina Auxiliante, the guild of shipowners on the southern strip of the beach, on land reclaimed from the sea next to Eugenia Viñes. One warehouse was for storage; the other housed the office, the tank, and the cold storage rooms. In the 50s, the warehouse and courtyard were joined, the roof was changed, and the industrial use was altered. Decades later, the building, now inactive, arrived looted in a neighborhood marked by the repealed Cabanyal Plan. At the end of 2014, the Marina Auxiliante itself offered the old factory to a neighborhood project that sought to recover public space without copying the commercial leisure projected onto the maritime villages.

December 2015: opens to the public

On December 16, 2017, the sociocultural center celebrated two years with circus, the urban artist Suso33, and a DJ: the opening took place in December 2015. In a few months, it had become a benchmark for an accessible offer—many free activities—that mixes music, dance, circus, cinema, literature, visual arts, and theater. In 2016, the venue already hosted the Teachers' Club, exhibitions, the Glaç Phònic cycle, and nights of synthesizers and IDM with the Valencian label Verlag System.

House in Room 2, live in the warehouse

The dance pulse is in Room 2, where the official agenda programs house, tech-house, grooves, and breaks, in night sessions and afternoon shifts. It is not a club that closes at dawn: it is an independent creative space —La Fàbrica de Gel in Valencian— with a bar, its own menu, and an industrial warehouse with high ceilings, exposed brick, containers, and a stage. In that warehouse, jazz, soul, Mediterranean music, and the Diumenges Turia coexist by the seashore, in addition to markets like AiAiAi. The first biennium already went from electronics to gastronomy in the same venue, a step away from the promenade.

Facing the sea, no reservations

The venue operates at Calle José Ballester Gozalvo, 37 —the old Pavía— in Cabanyal. It warns that it does not take reservations. It opens from Tuesday to Sunday; on Fridays and Saturdays, it extends until 02:30. The electronic dance floor is one more layer of a venue that remains, above all, the conversion of an ice chamber into a meeting place for the maritime neighborhood.