The second awakening of the Paratge de Tudela

It’s an inhospitable, wild, energetic, and inspiring place. Salvador Dalí himself captured shadows, shapes, and volumes here and presented them in some of his most iconic works. In the 1960s a tourist complex deformed the site and ripped its essence apart until, a few decades later, an environmental restoration project returned the purity that should never have been taken away.

The Paratge de Tudela hiking area is located a few kilometers from Cadaqués, but anyone who visits this area for the first time will wonder if they’ve landed on another world, a planet devoid of human beings. It is a powerful place where the Cap de Creus Sea, the north wind, and the metamorphic rocks have been playing furiously and relentlessly for millennia. They erode the landscape, transforming it into one of the world’s unique geological treasures and sculpting a wonderful gallery of realistic and surreal figures.

The Club Med years

This uniqueness of the Paratge de Tudela, the beach, and Culip cove, all close together, attracted the attention of the Club Med in the 1950s. They added Tudela to their catalog of vacation destinations with a tourist complex featuring a capacity for 1,200 people. It was inaugurated in 1962 and was very successful, but the declaration of the Cap de Creus Natural Park in 1998 marked the beginning of its end. It closed in 2004.

The road to recovery

A few years later, the project to dismantle and restore the environment at the Paratge de Tudela was put in place so the area could be reborn. The project was developed by the EMF-Martí Franch and J/T Ardévol i Associats studios and was divided into phases. The club’s invasive exotic flora and ornamental plants that had alarmingly displaced native species were removed. The 400 buildings, road system, and concrete access structures to the coves and beaches on site were demolished. The resulting debris was sorted and recycled. With the cleared terrain and open scars, the topography and natural drainages were redone to enable the land and sea to recover their dynamics and ecosystems. The last point in the plan involved the reorganization of the environment to show future visitors its beauty and uniqueness through an educational tour.

The most valuable award

All of these actions merited several awards, such as the Girona Region Architecture Award, the Rosa Barba European Landscape Award, and the American Association of Landscape Architects Award. Without a doubt, the best award is being able to head up the road that leads to the parking lot and hike out to the Camell viewpoint. This is where a limitless gaze unfolds for visitors, where they can see that yes, in this remote and fertile corner of the world, nature alone reigns and the sea and the wind continue to pound this rocky masterpiece emerging from the depths of the Mediterranean. //

Un esai que conté sensacions; més enllà del vi i la coceleria. Mirage ets tu.

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