Landscape Itinerary Around the North Estuary Of The Odiel River

A 30 km long green infrastructure connecting three towns and redeveloping their degraded urban-rural edges. Starting from an infrastructure and communications project, we propose adding value to the intervention, turning it into a fully equipped park. The route runs along disused railway tracks, livestock trails, the edges of marshes and salt flats, and some urban sections. It is marked by a series of elements (pergolas, bridges, rest areas and viewpoints) which, like acupuncture points and strategically located, help to guide the route, set the pace and make the territory legible.

Citizens of the 21st century no longer live in confined spaces, with little connection to neighbouring municipalities. The Territory, as a space where life unfolds – work, residence, leisure, social relations – calls for the establishment of LINKS between the parts that make up our physical reality. The intervention is CONTAMINATED by other disciplines beyond architecture, present in the work territory, and, in addition to architecture, it involves engineering, hydraulics, infrastructure, heritage, ethnography, botany, biology, sport and even public health. The meagre budget available has forced us to sharpen our wits and concentrate our efforts on very specific points along the extensive route, to prevent the action from being diluted. Starting with an infrastructure and communications project, we added value to turn it into a fully equipped park. In short, the aim is to take advantage of a LOOP route to reflect on the future and development of the delicate territory it surrounds.

The project oscillates between the large scale of the territory and the small scale of the architectural pieces, with the medium scale commonly found in architecture barely appearing. To define its morphology and choose the materials, the strategy involves recalling the rich natural and cultural heritage of the territory and maintaining its essence: its riverside, mining and railway character, and its conception as a large viewpoint from the rural land. All of this is reflected in the use of sinuous and organic forms, the same ones that tidal nature shows us. In terms of materials, we have resorted to those historically used in this territory: breakwaters, floodgates, sheet piling, untreated wood and water crossings reinterpreted with honeycomb panels. The traces of the rich mining and railway past are reflected in the use of steel and perforated sheet metal to construct bridges, pergolas and viewpoints, hybrids between architecture and sculptures stranded in the territory.