MECHINAL reads Granada not as a fixed image, but as a living section—an accumulation of historical, climatic, and infrastructural layers where survival has always depended on territorial design. Granada’s endurance was fundamentally hydraulic: overcoming gravity and making an arid hill habitable through the Royal Canal (Acequia Real), a meticulously calibrated system of minimal slopes that delivered not only water, but comfort.

The intervention is located in Paseo de Romayla, a 14,000 m² strip trapped between the Darro River and the Alhambra’s retaining walls—an abandoned hydraulic ruin, today a latent void of terraces and wild vegetation. The project reactivates it by decoding a repetitive, essential detail in the existing walls: the mechinal, a small drainage opening that relieves hydrostatic pressure and prevents collapse. This modest element becomes the pixel of the project.

From there, the proposal operates through an overlaid surface: a light, continuous layer that settles onto the topography and transforms a passive ruin into an active system for water capture, storage, filtration, and return. The result is a new public landscape of social—and also hygrothermal—comfort, extending the thermodynamic logic of the Alhambra’s patios.

The project unfolds in three scenes:

The ground, where a hydraulic park merges restored agricultural terraces with wetlands, basins, and drinking fountains—creating “cool islands” and turning water treatment into a playable public realm.

The porous wall, an inhabited scar working in section: massive containment against the mountain, contrasted with a lightweight, dry-assembled aluminum structure—fully reversible and permeable to light, air, and views.

The excavated grandstand, descending to the Darro to resolve a historical debt: reopening a direct public access to the river, allowing citizens to follow clean water from capture to its return to the riverbed.

Ultimately, the proposal holds a double condition: inside, a 21st-century inhabited filtering infrastructure; outside, a silent backdrop that echoes historic earthen walls—letting the landscape, and the Alhambra itself, remain the true protagonists.