The project proposes reopening the Darro River, historically known as Dauro, along its urban stretch between Plaza de Santa Ana and Genil River, restoring to Granada a watercourse buried beneath a nineteenth century vault. Conceived as a sanitary solution, this underground infrastructure has progressively generated structural vulnerabilities, leakages, hydraulic overpressure and recurring collapse episodes. In response, the intervention reframes river reopening as an urban, hydraulic and heritage driven strategy.
The operation reestablishes the river as a continuous green blue infrastructure, recovering the historic relationship between city and water through a naturalized public axis integrating landscape, ecology and social activity. The project lowers the urban level to the original riverbed elevation, enabling direct physical, visual and acoustic interaction with the water while generating a linear sequence of public spaces connected to the river.
Along the course, four public plazas are introduced, each associated with a human sense—touch, sound, sight and taste—and a specific mode of inhabiting water. These spaces are conceived not as isolated episodes, but as a continuous system accompanying the river flow and structuring a progressive urban experience.
The buried historic bridges are reinterpreted through lightweight timber structures that do not replicate their original form, but instead reveal their former position, function and memory, integrating them into each plaza as accesses, viewpoints or crossings.
The project ultimately transforms the Darro into a structuring urban axis for Granada, combining historical memory, environmental restoration and contemporary public uses while redefining the relationship between infrastructure, landscape and collective urban life.