Roques Blanques Cemetery is located in the Serra de Collserola in Barcelona, at the foot of Pico Madrona, where the mountain massif meets the natural course of the Rubí torrent.
The topography is very irregular, with slopes between 15% and 30% and the wooded nature of the area, with pine trees strongly determined the image of the place.
The first of the project decisions was to design the niches as retaining walls, to allow the creation of terraces that, like agricultural strips, adapt to the slopes of the mountains that enclose the valley.
These terraces are grouped in numbers of two or three, forming closed sets, with a pavement of fine aggregate and with a planting of trees native to the site, combined with trees more typical of gardens (palm trees, bananas trees...) and with bushes trimmed according to geometric shapes, taking on the aspect of an abandoned garden ringed in the landscape.
In front of the walls, a stylised pergola with ivy, jasmine and wisteria enables the creation of a more intimate area while helping to create a more global scale of the site.
Therefore, we reduce the form of agricultural settlement typical of the Mediterranean as well as that of gardens located in enclosures of similar topography.
This set of groupings is traveled by a one-way ring road, based on existing paths from which the different groupings hang with independent exits and entrances.
The one-way nature of the road, while making it impossible to get lost, because following it in the indicated direction you get to the starting point, offering all the possible points of view on the landscape and therefore an intense geographical knowledge of the place you are visiting.
The old country house that has been converted into the headquarters of the administration services, is the starting and ending point of this tour. Newly built bodies replace the old, attached buildings, while freeing up two courtyards around the main volume that close it off from the outside.
The entirety of the cemetery, both buildings and walls, are built with prefabricated concrete blocks, punctuated by a piece of artificial stone, which over time gives it the appearance of a dispersed action in space, and is related to the agricultural constructions that are they are scattered throughout the area.
