The final presentation went well last night – despite finishing the report less than an hour before the event began! It was attended by the Mayor, Councillors, some community members, the technical school students, journalists and various other people who’ve advised and helped us along the way. Everyone seemed pretty pleased with the outcome (though the event was all in Spanish so really they could’ve been talking about anything!)

Right now I’ve got to finish squishing the last of my things in my suitcase, then off to one last evening of tapas with the rest of the project team. I promise you’ll get all the details plus “before” and “after” photos when I get home!

Adios, Martos!

The final sunset

The Project was featured on Andalusian TV station Canal Sur news program – you can see the YouTube of the segment here (but again it’s probably not much use to you unless you speak Spanish).

Can’t believe we’ve only got one weekend to go. At the moment we’re frantically trying to finish our report and preparing for the Great Unveiling tomorrow night – hope the rain calms down by then!

Last week’s 35 degree sunshine has given way to 16 degrees, grey skies and bucketing rain. Lucky we had good weather for the intervention, but would’ve been nice if Autumn could’ve held off for just one more week!

Our task (though rather vague) is to make some recommendations and possibly put forward some design options for the immediate surrounds of the Fuente Nueva, which includes a square that lies behind the fountain, an alfresco area used by a cafe / bar to the west of the fountain, and the T-junction intersection directly in front of the fountain.

We’ve found that the local government is pretty responsive to our suggestions, and there appears to be little red tape involved in most decisions. For example, we suggested last week that two small redundant buildings adjacent to the fountain, a former kiosk and a small electrical sub-station that is no longer used, be demolished. The wreckers rolled in yesterday and they’re now gone! I’d like to see that speed of action from Perth local governments!

Jafet, an architect from Mexico completing his Masters in Urban Design in Barcelona, and I have been charged with the task of coordinating the urban planning section of our report. It’s been a frustrating few days, and very much an example of “design by committee”, but we’ve now got today and tomorrow to pull the recommendations of the group together into something that is ambitious but realistically achievable by the local government after we leave.

Jafet putting pencil to paper

“This is where the pavement changes”…”We should definitely widen the footpath to here”…

Architects love CAD

Well, not quite. BUT the Martos Project team did get a visit from some journalists from El Mundo (“The World”) newspaper, a national publication with apparently the second largest distribution in Spain, so I’m told. So we’re pretty much celebrities (though I think we only made it to the online edition, under the Andalusian section. Details, details)!

The article is available online here (but unfortunately it’s in Spanish). There’s also a short video (that hilariously features no less than seven seconds dedicated to Jafet’s behind!)

They’ve taken quite an odd quote of mine a little out context – when I was interviewed I said lots of lovely things about what a valuable and interesting experience it’s been, but the one thing they chose to publish was an off-hand comment about how dirty the work has been, and that I can’t say it’s been all fun! Unfortunately, they also incorrectly refer to me as an art historian, not a town planner!

Córdoba was an Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, and in the Middle Ages became the capital of the Islamic caliphate. It has been estimated that in the 10th century and beginning of the 11th century, Córdoba was the most populous city in the world, though it is now a mid-sized city of about 330,000.

Our main destination in the city (other than coffee and tapas stops) was the Great Mosque. Like it seems most places we’ve visited, the site has a complicated history. It was originally a pagan temple, then a Visigothic Christian church, before the Umayyad Moors converted the building into a mosque and then built a new mosque on the site. After the Spanish Reconquista, it became a Roman Catholic church, with a plateresque cathedral later built into the centre of the large Moorish building.

Row upon row of double arched columns in the mosque (that made you want to run like a kid through the school hallways… but I reluctantly refrained)

Contrasts between different stages of development

Doorway to the street

Group hug

We escaped Martos early on Saturday, arriving in Granada at about 11 – perfect time for a late breakfast of tostadas and cafe con leche. We spent the afternoon visiting the Royal Chapel and the Cathedral, wandering the streets, meandering between shops, and stopping to snack at regular intervals – including my first churros in Spain (can’t believe it’s taken me so long)! In the evening we went out for tapas and sangria, and stopped at a bar or two on the way back to the hotel.

The essential first port of call

Granada Cathedral

Laurita demonstrating the incredible scale of the Cathedral

A detail of one of the two amazingly impressive organs in the Cathedral

Clouds and shadows

Street stalls with amazing aromas selling spices, nuts, lollies, candied fruit and teas

We got up early again on Sunday to take the bus to Cordoba, but you’ll have to wait until my next post for that!

Hasta luego, Granada!

• Dry brush cleaning of the whole fountain facade, rear and basins
• Removal of plastic coating to both upper and lower basin with chisels, and when that didn’t work, power tools
• Removal of biological growth with hydrogen peroxide solution (in some cases we tried a poultice but didn’t find it to be very effective)
• Chiselling out of joints for both aesthetic and structural reasons – a lot of the joint work was very ugly and covered some parts of the stones, but was also done with very hard mortar that can be damaging to the stone.
• Repointing of joints with appropriate lime mortar. We found that there was no bedding mortar used so we used a more coarse mortar to fill deep holes before the surface mortar.
• Removal, repair and reinstatement of top finial / weather vein
• Consolidation of scaling and peeling stone through injection of acetone and fluoline, followed by sealing with fluoline and stone powder paste
• Relining the basin floors with lime mortar
• Painting of the rear facade
• Biocide treatment to biological growth-prone areas to retard reoccurrence

The restoration of our two lions, Jose and Juan, is the only thing left to be completed, as they require the specialist attention of our fearless conservation leader, Laura. We hold high hopes that they will make a full recovery!

Final touches to the repointing – the light at the end of the tunnel puts a smile on Katie and Saba’s faces

Our beautiful shield after the peroxide treatment and meticulous scrubbing with toothbrushes paid off!

Watch out biological growth – Katie and I are coming for you!

Stone consolidation to prevent further surface deterioration

For a girl who works mostly behind a computer screen, it’s been really rewarding to see all our physical work producing visible results, that I know not only improve the appearance of the fountain but will also safeguard it for the future. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve achieved!

We continued winding our way through narrow streets to look out over the cathedral, watch the sun set and stop at a few little shops with assorted Arabic influenced wares. Finally we were lead into an underground cavern of a room for traditional flamenco music and a bit of dancing, lead by a gorgeous old man with more character than you could poke a stick at!

The Alhambra from St Nicholas Square

The Islamic influences are so apparent in the architecture

Laurita, Shani, Jafet, Gerardo and Dan

Sunset over Granada

The flamenco cave

We barely managed to scrape the surface of the city in the couple of short hours we had – compounded by the fact that it takes ten times as long to do anything when you have to organised a group of 15-odd people! Hopefully I’ll have the chance to get back there in the not too distant future!

The Alhambra’s Islamic palaces were built in the 10th century for the last Muslim Emirs in Spain and its court, of the Nasrid dynasty. After the reconquest by the Catholic monarchs in 1492, the place was used by Christian rulers and military. Many changes and additions were made particularly during the rule of Charles V. The complex is resultantly an eclectic mix of styles, tastes and organisation, however the place is dominated by the Muslim influences, particularly in the proliferation of ornamentation.

We were so lucky to have the Director of Conservation for the Alhambra and Generalife guide our tour of the place (on his day off!) – we spent over five hours wandering through the palaces, courts and gardens as well being shown a rare look behind closed doors at many areas off-limits to the public, including sultan’s baths, balconies over looking incredible views of the Alhambra and Granada, as well as current archaeological and conservation work sites. Incredible!

The picture postcard photo of the Alhambra – if only there weren’t so many other tourists in the way!

A beautiful interpretation of a ruined wall with cyprus hedges

A rare behind-the-scenes look at current conservation works

Richly ornamented gypsum covers interiors and exteriors – such a sensory overload

The newly completed conservation project of the Fuente de los Leones – this project spanned over ten years, and only opened a couple of months ago so we were very lucky to see it. It does raise some interesting questions about the extent of reconstruction, and in my opinion it looks a little too “new”.

Geometric tiling patterns covered the lower portions of interior walls

Looking out over Granada from our private balcony

Until next time…

Choosing from literally hundreds of photos was nearly impossible!

It started last Sunday with the longest day of planning and making the final decisions about our approach, but also about our capacity – what could we feasibly complete in the two short weeks we have to do it?

Whilst our subject place has many issues (and as we work, we find more and more every day), our approach really has to be of “first aid” or we’d be here forever (as lovely as Martos is, I don’t think any of us would want that!). This has required strict prioritising of issues, and finding the difficult balance between making sure that we do our best to ensure the fountain survives for the foreseeable future, as well as making a visible aesthetic improvement so that the Mayor and the town don’t wonder what the hell we’ve been doing for the past six weeks!

The complexity of the project was compounded by the various backgrounds, knowledge, levels of expertise and points of view across the participants, coordinators and experts on site, and the sheer number of people trying to make decisions with no single person charged with the responsibility of having the final say. We’ve also been helped out this week by the local craft school (more like a technical college that teaches skills to young people aged 16 – 25, who generally didn’t complete high school), which has been wonderful in terms of man power to get things done, but has also presented its own challenges in terms of approach.

So after many long days of scrubbing off mosses, lichens and dirt (sometimes with a toothbrush) off every surface; chiselling out impossibly hard cement mortar joints; scraping plastic coating off the basins; and injecting acetone and fluoline carefully into scaling inscriptions, plus countless bumps bruises and more grubby dirt and dust than I’ve ever had crusted onto me in my life – I think we’re finally feeling like this could be achievable, with just 5 more days to complete it!

Safety first on the scaffolding – all harnessed up!

Shani and Laurita put some elbow grease into chiselling out joints

The craft school boys seemed to like to power tools a little too much

Injecting fluoline into the micro cracks of the inscription to consolidate and retard further deterioration