Abstract
The Costa Brava is not just a place within the territory, nor can it be summed up in an image, or approached through a single aspect. The complexity of its multifaceted landscape, makes it unattainable. A landscape that had hardly changed at all until the arrival of the mass tourism of sun and sand in the early 1960s. Its geographical characteristics, the climate and the people who lived there. helped make the Girona coast one of the most popular holiday destinations in Europe, a place where photography played an essential role in the creation of imagery associated with the name: “Costa Brava”. This thesis studies the Costa Brava, from its christening by Ferran Agulló, in 1920, to the transformation produced during the 1960s; through documentation obtained from original sources consisting of paintings, photographs, tourist guides, newspaper articles, theses and architectural projects that are framed within this geographic and temporal context. when a new and unknown form of hotel architecture emerged along the coast, an architectural style that in an exemplary way, was introduced into the landscape, creating a new one. New hotels popped up almost simultaneously, from the South to the North, where regulations created in 1954 for the protection of the landscape, played a crucial role in the volumetric configuration of the buildings according to the characteristics of the landscape where they were to be introduced. Through an interlinking approach, architecture appears throughout five chapters, described with text, drawings and photographs that illustrate the new facilities for tourism and their role in the transformation of the landscape. An architecture that, with a language that is both modern and at the same time, rooted in the constructive tradition of fishing towns, found its place through the natural composition of its component parts. The analysis of the various editions of the Costa Brava Guide by Josep Pla, together with a selection of tourist guides published between 1929 and 1970, confirm the changes in the landscape, where the first colonisers, the hotel buildings, charted the course for the future development of the Costa Brava. The work of tour architects of Girona, Joan Maria de Ribot i de Balle, Josep Esteve Corredor, Josep Claret i Pelai Martinez, provide a vision of an architecture designed with sensitivity towards the territory, contributing to the creation of the landscape with the construction of certain buildings that still stand out today for their minimal imprint. Until a few years ago we could still see how the architecture of the Club Med of the Cap de Creus managed to blend into the Plana de Tudela. The hotels, despite their simplicity, became a model to be imitated, where the containment of its dimensions, the framing of the landscape from the inside and the provision of a tourist-suitable living space established this architecture as the seal of quality of the recently presented Costa Brava. Finally, the discovery of the unpublished archive of the photographer and publicist Tomàs Mallol was the catalyst for the research. The images he used show us the evolution of the landscape and the hotel architecture at a time when the newly opened hotels respectfully met the urgent accommodation needs of the new tourists without forgetting the landscape, their main value. The interconnections between the people involved, the buildings and the places appear in very diverse source material that depicts a unique Costa Brava. Travelling back in time through the images, we can re-discover the Costa Brava, just as the first tourists themselves discovered it. The Costa Brava that was, and that, although different, maintains its essence.
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