El Eucaliptal Visitor Center

Punta Umbría (Huelva), 2011

The memory of a settlement.

Three attributes of the archeological remains of El Eucaliptal constitute the proposal for the visitor center: their layout, their level and their current and future extension. The layout of the remains—salting and tincture industries—speaks of a form of settlement linked to the sources produced by the river. The center’s position recovers this layout and orientation as a mechanism of memory and identity, thus placing itself critically against the banal configuration of the more recent developments. The level of the remains, a couple of meters below that of the street, evokes the passing of time; by positioning the center at that level we enable an integrated passage from our contemporary daily life to that of centuries ago. The current archeological window and ongoing studies show that the extension of the remains is greater than what is exposed at present; assuming this possibility lets us embrace the entirety of the remains to generate a broader perception of them, establishing a building that is made to fit both those that we can now see and those yet to be revealed.