Enveloping the marsh. Reflections on interventions in fragile landscapes. The case of the Odiel Marshes

The history of marshlands is linked to hostility and its status as servile territories unsuitable for the development of human settlements. Ancient military cartographies recognize paths between muddy lands plagued by mosquitoes, where people or animals disappeared without a trace. A landscape of disinterest.

Little by little, man tamed the marshland. While the cities took shape on the dry land as a melting pot of co-existence, the flooded areas were transformed into fertile productive territories: salt pans (places exposed to the wind), milling (tide mills), quarries (extraction of oyster stone), estuaries (developing controlled fishing systems), soap factories (using seaweed), and even vegetable gardens.

The collapse of the artisanal processes brought about by the Industrial Revolution condemned the marshlands to abandonment, unable to compete with the efficient modern factories (Fig. 1). Their vacant land became a lucrative opportunity for twentieth-century developmentalism. They became a blank piece of paper valid for almost any use: airports, irrigation, refineries, industrial estates, and, above all, coastal tourist expansion areas.

Figura 1.

Rubbish dump in part of an old salt mine. Puerto Real (Cádiz). Source: AA. VV. (2004).

Fortunately, the development of environmental awareness in the 1980s put many of these plans in check, but dealt with the system with a simple equation: that of declaring protected natural spaces, authentic contemporary museums of the territory, alien to their former vitality. The future looks uncertain. Climate change has become a plausible thesis that conditions our actions. As Cuvier announced, each historical cycle has had to face its own particular catastrophe, and ours is already with us. The face of the Anthropocene, the one masterfully portrayed by Burtynsky, is as plastically graceful as it is overwhelmingly predictable, and even for Trump, there is no longer any doubt that climate change is not a hoax and will definitively change the surface of the planet as we know it.

Society is calling for a new type of management of its landscapes, and the work we analyze in this article modestly aims to approach it. Thus, using the opportunity to materialize and develop the layout of a green infrastructure in one of these watery landscapes in southern Europe as a guiding thread, we propose that a commitment be made to reconcile these territories with nature and man, in order to recover the energy that turned them into engines of local economies and convert them into spaces of opportunity and fertile producers of contemporary ecologies. For a landscape to remain alive, it must remain functionally active in its natural, economic, and social aspects (Fig. 2). Efforts should be made to enhance the character of the greenway at a higher level, not only in terms of mobility but also in terms of the infrastructure itself becoming the driving force that reactivates the area of action.

Figura 2.

Aerial views of the transformation process of the Cardeñas salt flats. Huelva, 1956-1978, 1981-2019. Source: Authors based on Google Earth.

About the place: the estuary of the Odiel River (Huelva, Spain)

Landscape does not exist without the human gaze, and the gaze is always conditioned by culture. This is stated in Article 1 of the European Landscape Convention 2000: "Landscape means any part of the territory as perceived by the population, the character of which is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors". The landscape is therefore a dynamic reality. As change is their main attribute, landscapes do not stand still in time. In some cases, change follows the rhythms of nature, which are generally quite slow. In other cases, however, social rhythms predominate and can be extremely rapid.

The case in question is a clear example of dynamism and change. Under the influence of the moon, the water filled the entire estuary of the Odiel marshes twice a day and receded twice a day, in a series that is repeated every six hours (Fig. 3). All of this creates a shifting and undefined environment, ebbing and rising at the same time: a place of change due to the influence of the tides.

Figura 3.

High tide and low tide on the Pinar de la Algaida Path, 2002. Authors of the project: Ramón Pico and Javier López (Arquitectura, Ciudad y Territorio Andaluz). El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz). Source: Fernando Alda, photographer.

The action planned in the northern estuary is intended to decongest the intense use of the southern area and to shift part of this interest to the north, to offer the inhabitants of Huelva, Gibraleón, and Aljaraque a new attraction on a territorial scale. This constitutes a new space to enter, unknown to the vast majority, and with a low degree of anthropization compared to other nearby river territories such as the Guadalquivir, which makes it, if anything, more interesting (Fig. 4).

Figura 4.

Ángel de Saavedra. Geographical plan of the estuary of the rivers Tinto and Odiel (Huelva), 1810. Source: Barranco Molina (1998).

This is one of those places of oblivion and abandonment that is so common in the contemporary city. A place that today, paradoxically, thanks to this, is a great reservoir of opportunity spaces, a territory where small acupuncture-like operations will be introduced to regulate the projected uses, so that in years to come, others will be able to sow new seeds in the form of future initiatives. The interest in this area was reflected in the multidisciplinary publication by Juan Manuel Campos Carrasco as editor, under the title El patrimonio histórico y cultural en el paraje natural marismas del Odiel: un enfoque diacrónico y transdisciplinar, in 2016, which explores an approach to the place from different and, at the same time, complementary points of view. Interest in this place means that the concerns surrounding the Odiel marshes are not limited to theoretical research. Indeed, the Ministry of Environment and Territorial Planning of the Andalusian Regional Government has put out to tender the drafting of the works project and environmental and landscape restoration of the landscape itinerary. It also intends to requalify the urban edges in the northern estuary of the Odiel, in the province of Huelva, in the framework of which the reflection raised here is included.

After the great public success of some nearby urban operations, such as the Paseo de la Ría, in the southern estuary, it was not now a question of putting territorial identity before urban identity, but only of trying to reconcile city and nature, two concepts which in the traditional city have been antithetical. Perhaps this is not difficult in the case of Huelva, a city with few urban attractions, but which is surrounded by a province with a privileged natural environment.3 If we understand the northern estuary of the Odiel as an enormous piece of nature inserted between the metropolitan area formed by Huelva, Gibraleón, and Aljaraque, we would find ourselves with a case similar to those cited by North American urban theories, where "The city is an aggregation of built-up lumps weakly cohesive with each other by an immense urban forest" (García-Vázquez 2009, 173). Hopefully, what García-Vázquez describes in the case of Albuquerque will happen here: that the intermediate landscape-northern sanctuary will end up becoming the city’s hallmark. To achieve this, and according to the same author, based on a story by V. B. Price, nature should not be felt "beyond", but "within". That is what this action is about: opening up a new landscape to our gaze, not towards the marshland but from it, from within. The starting point is a greenway, but the final objective goes beyond that; it is about recovering that look, that knowledge, and that feeling of identity.

On how to intervene: gaze, access, and the right to landscape

The transformation of nature, like almost all human work, must transcend mere functionality to be enriched with actions that incorporate aesthetics and symbolic meaning for its users. In this case, the recognition of the Odiel marshes as a Biosphere Reserve in 1989, significantly altered the relationship between the populations of the Odiel estuary and this marshland territory, in a process that clearly called for the contribution of new functionalities, but also of other values, new identities, and renewed meanings.

This appointment institutionalized a process of definitive mutation: the marshland went from villain to heroine; it became a great jewel, the new heart in charge of giving life to an ailing urban system. Once its importance had been detected, the shaping of what was to be revealed as a unique space began, with three indispensable components: to restore the gaze of an urban system that has tried to deny it in recent times; to guarantee access (in a broad sense, far beyond the physical) for the inhabitants and species that inhabit its surroundings; and to build a system that would guarantee the right to the landscape, to its perceptive and active enjoyment.

In terms of the first component, we must understand that normally in these marshy territories, the abandonment of activities has caused a clear denial by the urban spaces that surround them, which end up turning their backs on them and building dramatic areas behind. Thus, an obligatory first action was to restore the character of the degraded urban-rural edges to their coastal facades, integrating them into the immediate environment as part of a natural and cultural heritage, fortunately recognized today. In this sense, the edge of the northern estuary of the Odiel is identified as a visual corridor and strategic enclave of importance, as it constitutes a gigantic panoramic viewpoint from the rural land: of the metropolitan and urban, of the coast, of the countryside-port-city relations, and of a protected space with a high natural value. The riverside character of the three municipalities and their links with the access roads on the perimeter of this biosphere reserve made it possible to take supra-municipal action to improve its image, helping to reestablish the area’s cultural identification, and to propose a new model of relations between society and the natural space, taking special care to recover territorial infrastructures that had fallen into disuse and to reinvent their functionality and their capacity to requalify the edges of the associated peripheries.

In addition, and as a second action, the construction of the contemporary landscape made access an essential objective. To achieve this in physical terms, the most common element in today’s ecological urban planning is usually a large green infrastructure accessible to all. In this case, it would be a question of finding a route of some 30 kilometers in length, that can connect the populations of the three municipalities mentioned (some 180,000 inhabitants in total), and bring them closer to the great environmental, landscape, botanical, zoological, cultural, archaeological, heritage, and tourist wealth that encompasses the vast protected natural space of the Odiel marshes that surround them (7185 hectares) (Fig. 5). The key to the success of the project lies in finding this route and defining its viability, its transformational capacity, and the opportunities it offers. To this end, the transdisciplinary team of technicians who take on the project must be armed with patience, rigorous information, and an exploratory attitude.

Figura 5.

Water territory. Estuaries of the Tinto and Odiel rivers (Huelva) and final route of the itinerary, 2019. Source: Authors using a GIS system.

In this case, a large part of the route goes along disused old mining railways, as well as cleared cattle tracks and cleared land. But it is precisely at the connections between them and at critical points, where abandoned marshland pools or hyperactive traffic roundabouts intersect, that the best surprises and opportunities —which will provide the infrastructure with added value— can be found.

Beyond guaranteeing physical access, the process must also strive to seek relationships that will broaden mental, identity, and cultural connections with the place. To this end, it is tremendously effective to identify elements that propose explorations beyond the thin (in territorial terms) lines of infrastructure, planting seeds that stimulate remote visitors or users, and that ultimately propose new physical and mental connections for the future.

The philosophy of the project stems from the consideration that 21st century citizens no longer inhabit cities, towns, or specific places —even if they live in them—, with barely any contact with neighbors in other nearby municipalities. Where do cities today begin and end? What are their real boundaries? Do citizens today belong to a single city? Or do most of them work in a place different from the one they live, different from where their children’s school is, and different from their places of leisure? Where are the spaces in which they meet and spend their leisure time? Do cities have spaces available for productive, leisure, and opportunity activities linked to contemporaneity?

Undoubtedly, all these and other questions refer us to the concept of territory (natural, cultural, and built), as a space where contemporary life, work, residence, leisure, and social relations, take place, far beyond the concept of the traditional city and even beyond administrative concepts such as urban agglomeration. And at least since the appearance of the Brundtland report of 1987 —almost at the same time as the Marismas del Odiel declaration— under development parameters that satisfy the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations.

Therefore, the possibility of creating routes, spaces, and activities that link the territories and the parts that make them up represents a golden opportunity to adapt to the changing times in which we live and, in short, to be able to link natural landscape and life. This defines the general objective of the proposal, broken down into five specific objectives:

From a dynamic perspective of the project, the collection of proposals presented is divided into three categories: loop (base route), grafts (possible nodes) and seeds (future initiatives). Based on an infrastructure and communications project, which originates from the call for tenders launched in 2018 by the Department of Environment and Territorial Planning of the Regional Government of Andalusia, which we mentioned earlier, our aim is to to give more than what is requested and, with small strategically placed interventions, to add value to the intervention to turn it into an equipped park in the future. It is a question of taking advantage of an operation in the form of a loop to reflect on the long-term development of the whole territory it encompasses (Fig. 6).

Figura 6.

Exploded axonometry of the execution area and the definitive route of the northern Odiel estuary itinerary (Huelva), 2019. Source: Authors.

About scales and materials; S, M, L, XL. Proposals for territorial acupuncture

In the construction of the landscape, both the preliminary work of site reconnaissance and the development of the project itself are far removed from the usual methods and scales used in the architect’s profession. Although reconnaissance visits to a site or building can usually take a few hours, in this case, it took at least two full days to complete the reconnaissance of this vast territory, which we covered on foot (22 kilometers). As opposed to meters and centimeters of frontage or depth, we have used the hectare (9 being the total area intervened) or the kilometer (30 being the kilometers of the itinerary) as the unit of measurement. Three municipalities as opposed to just one; a multitude of regulations as opposed to a single municipal plan; a long list of contacts in the different administrations as opposed to the solitary municipal architect.

The proposed route starts with the six sections proposed in the competition and is finally divided into fourteen sections that respond to common territorial and landscape characteristics, and which serve to structure and domesticate, operationally speaking, the entire loop. But this is not enough: like any text, it needs punctuation marks to be legible; our itinerary is punctuated by a series of elements —strategically placed architectural-sculptural proposals of territorial acupuncture— that respond to the area’s landmarks that are discovered as we pass through and that contribute to mark out the route, to mark the rhythms and to make the territory legible (Fig. 7).

Figura 7.

Section of the Fraile wharf rest area. Itinerary of the Northern Estuary of the Odiel (Huelva), 2019. Source: Author

The strategy followed to define their morphology and choose the materials is intended to recall the rich natural and cultural heritage of the territory and undoubtedly involves maintaining the essence of these places: their riverside, mining, and railway character; their conception as a great scenic viewpoint from the rural land; their intermediate position between the rural and the urban, and their link with the vast space of the Odiel marshes which they surround.

All of this is materialized via the use of curved, natural, and organic forms, the same forms that the intertidal nature shows us in the marshes, in those interventions that are closer to the water (Fig. 8). In the more inland, more rural territory, geometry is used, as it was historically used in Andalusian settlements and agricultural typologies in territories with hardly any reference points.

Figura 8.

Visualization of the action on the Paseo Marítimo de Huelva. Itinerary of the Northern Estuary of the Odiel (Huelva), 2019. Source: Authors.

In watery terrain, breakwaters from nearby quarries, mud walls and sluice gates in salt pans, metal sheet piling, eucalyptus poles driven in, untreated wood that blends in with the environment over time, and water crossings in flood plains, recreated with hollow concrete core slabs, are used. On the other hand, the traces of the rich mining-railways past are reflected in the use of metallic materials such as steel and perforated sheet metal, with which the bridge, the pergolas, or the vantage point are designed, defined as hybrids between architectures and sculptures stranded in the territory.

The project is voluntarily contaminated by many other disciplines, beyond the purely architectural, already present in one way or another in the work territory long before a few modest and enthusiastic architects arrived there. And so the intervention —besides architecture— involves engineering (bridges and breakwaters), hydraulics (floodgates and sheet piling), infrastructure (roads and railways), landscape (viewpoints), culture (Tharsis wharf-loader), heritage (powder magazine), archaeology (various sites), ethnography (tidal mills and salt pans), ecology (spaces with maximum environmental protection and urban gardens), vegetation (25.000 new specimens planted), biology (water bodies for bird populations), geology (aggregates used from nearby quarries), sport (piers for canoeing and fishing) and even public health (promotion of non-motorized mobility).

On time as project material

Zigmunt Bauman, the Polish philosopher who coined terms such as liquid modernity or liquid love, arbitrarily fixed the origin of modernity in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which was followed by a tsunami that severely affected the coast of Huelva. From then on, and in view of the enormous catastrophe caused by nature, human beings wanted to build something that would last forever. It was the time of solid modernity. However, today, times have changed. The life we live is, above all, changeable and moves at a dizzying pace. Everything is liquid, transient, from love to work.

The same is true of construction: works are never completely finished in perfect annularity; they always remain open to the action of time. All work remains open. Both time and memory are fluid states. Architecture, like any creative expression, is ephemeral and perishable. The soil on which we act has been created by the rock erosion, and rivers that carry their particles and deposit and sediment them in other places. The world is a process of constant erosion and sedimentation. This is how Le Corbusier captured it, photographically documenting the geographies caused by the sea on the beach (Fig. 9).

Figura 9.

Le Corbusier. Furrows in Arcachon Bay (France), 1936. Source: Benton (2013).

Much of this character was assimilated and expressed by authors such as Robert Smithson. Like him, our aim is to create a work that is not “natural,” but that is capable of revealing nature and time. His basaltic earth tongue Spiral Jetty remains, today, exposed to the natural water cycle of the Great Salt Lake, "as a sculpture in time, unfinished, open, and also subject to the entropy of the visit of many admirers" (Martínez García-Posada y Blázquez Jesús 2020, 17). His Partially Buried Woodshed is similar in that the territory appears as an active agent of constant and relentless transformation. Gordon Matta-Clark was surprised that "no one is engaged in anything more than preserving property, in making intrinsic modifications to their house, simply undoing what is done". These and other land-art artists impressed Miralles-Pinós during his time at Columbia: "With these people we discovered, for the first time, what architectures reinterpret a place". (Blázquez Jesús 2020, 17).

According to the above, while a work of art can show time, architecture must make time. Thus, an important part of the reflections on time discussed in previous paragraphs are directly applicable to the example we are dealing with here: the start and end dates of this adventure. The project will not begin at the bureaucratic act of staking out the project nor on the date of the presentation of the tender. It surely began to bubble in our minds when we were children running around those marshes —abandoned and full of mosquitoes— of the Gulf of Cadiz. And when will it end? Most likely not when the work is visited for the last time, nor when its liquidation is signed. It will be nature itself, the inclement weather and the passing of the seasons that will shape it day by day. We have only played a small part in the process, tiptoeing through it, and even renouncing the idea of being architects (García Solera 2004, 11). Or, as Moneo Vallés and Blázquez Jesús put it: "Our reward lies in experiencing this distance when we see our thoughts supported by a reality that no longer belongs to us. And furthermore: a work of architecture, if it is successful, ends up making the architect disappear" (2020, 184).

Finally, it should not be forgotten that any landscape project is a long journey, a patient process, to which we have tried to respond, in this case, from the perspective of a versatile and adaptable action plan. It is undoubtedly a long-term process, necessarily dynamic, with the capacity to adapt to time and circumstances (Fig. 10).

Figura 10.

Ansel Adams, Sunset over Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park, United States, 1942. Source: Adams (2000).

And remember that "for good architecture, its best day was never the first" (Jerez Abajo y Delgado Orusco 2018, 85).