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Architects: Villegas Bueno Arquitectura
- Year: 2014
Text description provided by the architects. A dense, heavy and kind blanket, trimmed just enough to make stark interior space for people.
The fortress dates from the fourteenth century, it is strategically located in the "Galician Band" defense line built to protect the south from Portuguese invasions, and the existing visual connection with nearby castles Cala and Santa Olalla del Cala can still be perceived.
The key conditions of the project were an extremely tight budget, the preservation of the heritage character of the castle, respect to previous interventions in the wall -regardless of their value or quality-, and an assurance of the use of the castle as a public meeting place for the people.
We took advantage of the steep slope of the natural terrain of the castle courtyard, formed by the natural rock substrate, to minimize the intervention. The project is reduced to a series of low retaining walls to shape the terraces that will host events, and other higher walls that allow us to control the ramps that ensure accessibility to all the usable space of the enclosure.
The areas that have been left untreated meet a twofold approach. On one hand, they reveal the extreme shallowness of the intervention, and on the other, they serve to show the budget constraints and pre-existing conditions in the interior courtyard. Thus, the intervention produces a new public square; castle walls as urban fabric, doors as streets leading into it, and the interior spaces as places for strolling. A new urban space surrounded by nature.
