San Baudelio de Berlanga

This article is part of the Hidden Architecture Series “Tentative d’Épuisement” , where we explore the practice of an architectural criticism without rhetoric and based mainly on the physical experience of the work itself. Este artículo forma parte de la serie “Tentativa de Agotamiento” , comisariada por Hidden Architecture, donde exploramos la práctica de una crítica arquitectónica ausente de retórica y fundamentada sobre todo en la experiencia física de la propia obra. On the move for half an hour, we have not yet come across any vehicles. The road looks like a clean cut in the territory, an infinite and empty line similar to that left by a ship struggling to navigate a frozen sea before capsizing. To the left and right, the landscape displays an indiscernible range of ochre, brown and yellow tones. Earth, trees, plants and abandoned buildings merge into a folded surface of hypnotic continuity. Only the many birds that take flight here and there interrupt this static harmony. The watercourses that run through this territory have dug furrows and crevices that the vegetation has been quick to colonise. Sometimes only the treetops, now bare in winter and with branches still glistening with frost and dew, are visible from a distance. The road rises us to the top of a plateau whose boundaries are not discernible; its only limit seems to be drawn by the sky. As we wind through a narrow canyon, close to our destination, huge, coal-dark vultures take flight as we pass. High above, we discover their shelters in countless hollows that water must have left in the limestone rock thousands of years ago. Their cursed dance of the dead halted, hundreds of eyes monitor our progress through their domain. Their funereal presence makes me imagine inhabiting this land as an act of violence. En marcha desde hace media hora, todavía no nos hemos cruzado con ningún vehículo.