San Esteban's Garden

The ha-ha or ‘wolf's leap’ is used in landscape design to establish a boundary without interrupting views over the horizon, and can replace visible fences. It is an open ditch that limits and prevents physical passage, but allows visual views. The project to cover the Arrabal de La Arrixaca archaeological site is based on this strategy and recovers and recreates the old Jardín de San Esteban, making it float above the site. On its perimeter an urban ha-ha delimits, protects and at the same time makes visible from the streets of the city the built traces of its own history. Thus, by means of a subtle architectural operation - which closes a cycle of destruction, discovery and waiting -, the proposal pairs two strata that collaborate in the construction of a paradoxical, useful and necessary urban artifice.

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The project is conceived at all times from the physical and visual continuity with the urban fabric, thus ensuring the permeability of the complex and attending to the history and tradition of the place, recalling and reinterpreting the old San Esteban Garden through an action that responds to the climatology of the place in the tradition of the Andalusian gardens.

The proposed planting rests on a large concrete plate containing a section of earth capable of accommodating large trees. Shade, which is essential in Murcia, takes on a double configuration here. On its perimeter, a double row of melias in tree surrounds provides the square with a changing, aromatic flowering plant border. In a central position with a dense pattern, an ordered group of Canary Island palm trees builds a sort of high plant hypostyle hall. The slopes that descend to the site are carpeted with rosemary and lavender and form a humid, aromatic and colourful perimeter.

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The project in its entirety behaves as an ‘interpretation centre’ of the city's history; it can simultaneously show the contemporary traces that surround the complex and the Andalusian ones from the visitable perimeter at an intermediate level between the street and the site, a sort of interlude between the past and the present of the city of Murcia that also becomes an active part of the museographic visit as a panoramic tour of the ruins.

During the day, the flaring cleft that surrounds the site brings the intense Mediterranean light into the interior. At night, a slight artificial glow bathes the site and faintly escapes to the outside, flooding the vegetation slopes with light, making them visible from the streets. At the same time, this same gesture allows for proper natural cross ventilation of the entire site, preventing the growth of lichen on the ruins and protecting it from rainwater at all times.

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