Mountain Architecture

Introduction: The Cultural Construction of the Mountains

Before the 19th century, interest in the mountains was merely military and productive, but in the early 19th century, a powerful imaginary around the mountains began to emerge in the cultural sphere, which was combined with a scientific interest. On the Iberian Peninsula, the first scientific expeditions, such as those of Puig i Cadafalch, had a cultural character and, in Spain as a whole, the historical account of the Reconquista played a fundamental role: the mountains were seen as a place of essences, of noble and ancestral value.

Pilgrimage Routes

Even before the mountains took on a scientific or cultural interest, people travelled through mountain areas along pilgrimage routes. In Spain, the Camino de Santiago (The Way of Saint James) is the most significant of the European pilgrimage routes. Its success fuelled an incipient development of infrastructures and services along the routes that run through the mountains along the Cantabrian coast. The Camino de Santiago is not the only relevant Spanish pilgrimage route: the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aránzazu was built along the Ignatian Way.

Mountaineering and Hiking in Spain

The idea of climbing a mountain as an interior journey and, to an extent, a moral conquest, was preceded by new aesthetic concepts like the exaltation of ‘sublime beauty’. In Spain, the popularization of mountaineering took place well into the 20th century: clubs sprung up all over, requiring new infrastructures such as networks of mountain shelters that served as support for ascents. With the spread of private vehicles, the interest in hiking also grew, in association with Sunday outings or children’s summer camps. The mountains near big cities become recreational weekend destinations.

Tourism Reaches the Mountains: Spas, Skiing and Summer Holidays

In Spain, mountain-related tourism, especially spas, was associated with wellness and aimed at the wealthy classes. Over time, spa complexes became oriented towards leisure and began to incorporate new services. But the activity that drove the tourist development of the Spanish mountains was, without a doubt, skiing. The first Spanish ski resorts opened in the 1940s, but the true popularization of the practice came at the end of the 1970s, when the intensity of tourist development in certain mountain areas forever changed the landscape and the economic model.

‘Mountain’ Architecture

It wasn’t just mountain towns that experienced this new development. In both planned and unplanned developments, the architectural expression of constructions often responded to the desire to appear as ‘non-urban’ architecture. Many resorted to the use of pitched roofs and a vernacular or traditional imaginary. In general, in mountain areas, modern architecture could accept elements that were understood to be alien to the formal repertoire of rationalism, in a less traumatic way.

• In depth Mountain Architecture