"Nature becomes a landscape when man frames it ." Le Corbusier.

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The municipality was born thanks to the intense mining activity that it had in its day and that generated the irregular urban layout that it currently has. At the end of the 19th century, the first buildings were erected by the British consortium that dedicated itself to the exploitation and began to build some houses for the mine workers. Thus, three neighborhoods originated: El Valle, Alto de la Mesa and Bellavista. Between the three neighborhoods, intermediate spaces appeared that gave rise to a disorderly growth based on the clogging of said spaces, giving rise to the current municipality. Despite these discontinuities in the urban landscape, the municipality prospered and at present the different neighborhoods maintain a relationship and cohesion such that they allow the perfect functioning of the town. However, there is a piece that is out of tune in all this order.

The Alto de la Mesa neighborhood is one of the original nuclei of the current urban area of ​​Minas de Riotinto. However, the special orography on which it sits has been an inconvenience for its integration into the urban fabric. This problem, which was accused by the suppression of road traffic from the old highway from Minas de Riotinto to Nerva due to the detour of the A-476, has led to greater isolation of the neighborhood. The problem is also exacerbated by other social factors, linked to the massive abandonment of the building by the families that traditionally settled in the neighborhood, and their concern for many others in which circumstances of risk of social exclusion concur. In addition, the population does not have spaces for the exhibition of all the heritage that it has after centuries of mining, of great cultural importance due to the unusual depth of the excavations.

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The intervention will be destined to be the first step in a network that is gradually consolidating itself as a tourist itinerary, made up of the Municipal Archive, the Mining Museum, the English Quarter of Bellavista, the train route and the view over the Corta de the Watchtower fundamentally and that nowadays they do not have an architectural space for reception, organization of visits, information, exhibition and staging of a cultural content with centuries of history.

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Spaces such as conference rooms, function rooms and workshop classrooms would complement a program as a focus of attraction for tourism, which would also offer these spaces to be able to give training courses on mining, as well as a place for research, disclosure and exposure of everything related to this or other aspects. Complementing all of the aforementioned cultural and educational intervention, and with special attention to the neighboring neighborhood, aspects such as cultural instruction and training for all ages take on special importance when giving the project as a whole a complexity necessary for the development of the project. This is why a small nursery is proposed to help complete and perfect the intervention, as well as a public space to help integrate the building, since the current need for free spaces in the town is quite noticeable.

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Walking through the interior of the building is experienced as a game of sensations in which the landscape changes as you travel, always remembering and valuing the landscape that is part of the culture of the town.

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