La Muela Park

El Viso del Alcor (Sevilla), 2008

A collection of ecosystems and ecotones.

Ecosystem-ecotone units, both natural and cultural, are the basic components for the construction of a park as an inclusive space in which activity becomes possible by the free and diverse will of the user.

La Muela is a place of transition, a space in which the Alcores and the Seville farmland interact, between rural and urban environments. Based on mankind’s manipulation of this territory, our proposal is to use the place’s existing elements and resources, enhancing their potential by introducing new ecosystems in accordance with the climate and topography. The incorporated and pre-existing ecosystems make up a network of focal points for the environmental, spatial, social and, of course, forest and faunal regeneration of the park. They act as landmarks while they are also capable of generating activities that are associated with a park that serves El Viso on a day-to-day basis and that aims at being incorporated into the network of large ex-urban public spaces of Seville’s metropolitan area.

The experience of a multiplicity of identities and eco-cultural landscapes is provided: green expanses of purely urban nature; lookout points; agricultural and livestock uses for educational and recreational purposes; natural and artificial water courses; woodlands of different types and densities; steppes and wetlands of diverse sorts around former mud quarries. This naturalization process of pre-existing elements and their intensification by the incorporation of new ecosystems implies a complex network of relationships between habitats. This is how the ecotones come about, as transition areas between ecosystems. The idea of ecotone is also applied to the the design of the diverse areas where the city and the park come into direct contact; walkways, lookout points, visitor centers, bridges, recreational and play areas and, even the nurseries and maintenance facilities of the park, all become thresholds with different material natures depending on their specific location…