Archello Awards 2025: Open for Entries! Submit your best projects now.
Archello Awards 2025: Open for Entries!
Submit your best projects now.

Visitors Center "Llanos de las Américas", Natural Parks Despeñaperros

Visitors Center "Llanos de las Américas", Natural Parks Despeñaperros
Ayerbe Recco Architecs

Visitors Center "Llanos de las Américas", Natural Parks Despeñaperros by M. Gómez Viveros + S. Matute Díez + Ayerbe Recco

The new Visitor Centre is located in a wooded setting, along with a local road of low traffic, at a point where depart several footpaths which will boost with new equipment.


The main feature of the work is to be reused four prefabricated modules that the regional government had acquired and used years ago as a temporary facility in support of other equipment in natural areas. The new visitor centre reuses them. But all must now have permanent building character.


To prevent the provisional aspect of containers, we designed a coating, in the form of lattice, ribbons of treated wood of pine, outwardly covering the whole. In the intense Andalusian summer the lattice also casts a shadow on the facades, improving the climate behaviour of the interior.


The programme is simple in line with less than two hundred square meters of the building. Access is by a covered porch, then goes to the space dedicated to reception and shop, and through it, to the exhibition and interpretive room. A small core of toilets is annex to the porch. The entrance ramp, slightly oversized, tries to bring a larger scale to the small building and create a link with the environment, also functionally, to incorporate a piece of wood as waiting bench or rest.


At the entrance to a small core of toilets is annex to the porch. The building incorporates a system of recovery of rainwater from the roof to a cistern buried for use in toilets. For the disposal of sewage has a buried compact sewage treatment plant. Electrification is resolved as standard to the passing near an air medium voltage network.