Between geology and the Atlantic: the Câmara de Lobos Salinas Complex Project. Architecture, Landscape and Regeneration on the south coast of the island of Madeira

With high population density and low infrastructure in this fishing area, the neighbourhood became, in the following decades, a socially stigmatised territory, with health problems, and one of the highest crime rates on the Madeira island. The degradation of the Ilhéu neighbourhood has become a major urban and social problem, prompting a political decision to proceed with its total demolition. At the same time, a plan was defined for relocating families to new social housing developments distributed across different areas of the autonomous region. Where there used to be a run-down neighbourhood, there is now a garden, “Jardim do Ilhéu”, with a square, leisure areas and a viewpoint.

The Salinas Swimming Pools project is, therefore, part of a broader process of urban regeneration, which sought to return dignity, safety and quality of life to the territory and its population, more than a leisure facility, the project assumes a symbolic role of reconciliation between the community and its coastal territory, proposing a public space accessible to the sea and integrating with the rest of the local urban fabric.

The initiative to create the Salinas Complex came from Sociedade Metropolitana de Desenvolvimento, S.A., an entity that aimed to rehabilitate and enhance urban and coastal areas. The development of the Salinas Complex unfolded in distinct phases, reflecting an organic and responsive approach to the site’s needs and opportunities. Initially, the project was conceived and developed between 2002 and 2004. This first phase focused on creating public swimming pools and a promenade, essential elements for enjoying the coastline. Later, between 2005 and 2006, the project was complemented with the addition of the restaurant, parking and plazas. The work expands on the site’s composition, following the island’s territorial tradition, with the operation achieving a definition through successive walls and platforms, creating an area that can be perceived as an accessible, visually and thematically connected entity. Tuñon has already written that the project aims to address and articulate different aspects, overlapping with the program and enabling autonomous operation (TUÑON, 2008: 6, our translation).

For him, this decision helps reduce the impact of connecting these spaces to a circuit of walkways, giving continuity to an old path by the sea and the city’s bastion, and articulating it as a coastal trail. The complex manages to overcome the elevation discrepancy between the upper and lower levels of the intervention, which totals 54 meters, by inserting platforms sequenced at descending levels, thereby maximising the view of the sea.

The program of the Salinas Complex includes a set of infrastructure and public spaces, namely swimming pools for adults and children integrated into the marine environment, a promenade that articulates the complex with the bay and Praia Formosa, and a support bar. The excavation in the slope was designed to support rooms, with changing rooms and sanitary facilities. In addition, there is a restaurant at a higher level than the pools and a parking lot located above the main road.

To demarcate and differentiate the materials, an oxide-red colour was applied to the promenade pavement, creating a clear distinction between concrete and basalt. Such pigmentation not only enhances the visual contrast with the maritime and rocky landscape but also serves as an ordering element, reinforcing the route’s orthogonal geometry.

Gonçalo Byrne, in his text about Paulo David’s architecture, “Un Archipielago de piensamientos”, writes:

“In the gradual approach to the pools of the Atlantic or the Casa das Mudas, formal systems and materialisations are identified that seem to derive from the natural matrix, transforming, however, these suggestions opened up to other, sometimes unexpected experiences” (BYRNE, 2008: 6, our transl.).

Among the adopted route solutions, the underpass, designed by João Gomes da Silva, stands out as particularly relevant. Originating in the parking area, this passage was installed at a lower level, and crosses the ER101 road (Câmara de Lobos Road), as shown in the second schematic section. The route culminates at the start of the garden platforms, at an elevation of approximately 27.5 meters, and continues to the sea. The main function of this infrastructure is to separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic, ensuring a safe and gradual transition to the leisure area. At the exit point, the tunnel provides a frame for the panoramic view of the vineyards that make up the garden, articulating a connection with the different ways that lead to the seafront.

In addition to the system of paths, architect Paulo David conceived a suspended passage as a second access to the complex. This walkway establishes a direct and horizontal connection between the road level and the central elevator. This constitutes the main vertical circulation element of the project, with a concrete monolith that connects the upper arrival level with the lower platform of the pools. Aesthetically, this volume goes beyond mere utility, as its verticality contrasts with the landscape, serving as a referential landmark; logistically, it becomes an ordering axis around which the routes are oriented, allowing visitors to visually map the space.

Continuing the analysis of the accesses, the topographic unevenness is not restricted to the elevator but is complemented by a dynamic and articulated system of ramps and staircases. This system is designed to offer alternative routes and distinct spatial experiences. The ramps, with slopes calculated to ensure universal accessibility, promote a fluid and contemplative descent, while the stairs serve as faster connection vectors, whose linearity is intentionally interrupted by rest levels treated as “viewpoints,” offering moments of relaxation and enjoyment.

In his proposal for the gardens, landscape architect João Gomes da Silva chose to retain the channels that lead to the watercourses adjacent to the retaining walls, which define the planting platforms. When analysing the routes and vegetation, we realised a clear design guideline: to flank the ramp with the gutter that houses the main pre-existing Levada (irrigation channel), while another is accompanied by a sloping plateau with banana trees.

The analysis of the site’s hypsometry and topographic survey, prior to the intervention, reveals that these waterways were already a striking feature of the terrain. Paulo David and João Gomes da Silva’s design strategy consisted of reorganising the spaces, respecting and integrating the Levadas into the new pedestrian paths. This decision demonstrates an approach to the structural reception of the territory, in which the existing water infrastructure is reinvested. In addition, the constant presence of water along the walk enriches the user’s sensory experience, gradually introducing the aquatic element before arriving to the ocean.

There is another basalt staircase, fundamental to the circuit, located behind the bar’s pavilion, which connects the user to the wildest landscape of the place. It promotes integration with a radical, pure geology, generating a sensory connection with the wind, the sea, and the rock.

These Platforms emerge as an element of the sectorization of space, allowing stairs and ramps to pass between them, thereby suggesting and demarcating the paths and connections for both the horizontal and vertical circuits. This design approach, with the staggered platforms, provides panoramic views as the user travels through the slits intended for the paths.

Continuing the circuit at an intermediate level, the second platform, with denser vegetation, returns to the island’s own flora. There, banana trees and vineyards are preserved on low terraces, rescuing the place’s agricultural memory and serving as a pedagogical and sensory device.

The textures of the soil, gravel, compacted earth, and washed concrete vary to mark the pace of the route, and the vegetation is used to provide shade. On the lower level, the bathing platform is organised, with minimal landscape design, limited to marking low planting lines and the punctual presence of resistant coastal vegetation. Here, architecture takes on greater prominence, but the landscape reading remains. The pavement, walls and accesses are designed as extensions of the ground, and the sea is treated as the central element of composition.

The overall strategy of landscaping is not to create a garden, but to extend the existing landscape structure. As João Gomes da Silva states: “What is built is the possibility of permanence. A new nature is not introduced, but what the place already offered in potential is extended.” (SILVA, 2019: 119)

One can subtly perceive an ordering of the territory by sectorizing the whole according to the soil’s original vocation: resting, cultivation, and bathing. The landscape design reinforces the legibility of the place, allowing visitors not only to enjoy the space but also to understand it.

Formally, the platform is presented as a linear, refined plane with a contained thickness, designed to minimise the visual impact and maximise continuity with the surrounding landscape.

David’s architecture is characterised by an intrinsic relationship with the terrain: he draws with the topography, excavates and designs to the rhythm of the slopes and dialogues with the sea and the winds. As Gonçalo Byrne observes:

“His works are perceived almost as geological formations, in which formal containment accentuates the unitary and compact perception of a stratification of overlapping planes, which in turn reveal the variation and complexity of interior voids, hierarchized around solid structural references” (BYRNE, 2008: 6, our transl.)

The platform is organised as a functional system, distributing the living areas, access to the tanks, outdoor showers, and surveillance points. At certain points, it extends to the sea, functioning as a viewpoint or diving area. In others, it is retracted, forming wind-protected corners where users can stay. There are no shade elements or fixed furniture, allowing for flexibility and promoting adaptation to climatic variation.

By organising the space around this continuous platform, the project gives the whole legibility and unity, allowing the visitor a clear reading of the paths and uses, while reinforcing the horizontality of the architectural feature in a context dominated by the cliff’s abrupt verticality.

In the words of João Gomes da Silva, it is a “drawing that teaches how to look” (SILVA, 2019: 97). And in fact, the platform guides the gaze: to the outline of the cliff, to the design of the houses at the top of the slope and to the maritime horizon. Almost a negative stage, the protagonist is in a landscape, and the architecture supports it. This result is achieved through a silent rigour, no excessive curve, no decorative elements, only the essential lines.

The platform also becomes a place of temporal transition: it resumes the ancestral vocation of the place of extraction, of exposure to the sun, of transformation by water. Today, instead of salt, it is the body that rests and transforms itself there. Architecture, preserve the time of permanence, of waiting, of the natural return of the slope.

One of the most striking aspects of the restaurant is the use of steel in the exterior cladding and sun protection systems. The natural oxidation of this material gives the building earthy tones that dialogue with the mineral layers exposed on the escarpment, promoting visual continuity with the rocky environment. Faced with the materiality of light and its revelatory capacity from the chosen materials, Byrne writes about Paul’s architecture:

“The cyclical variation of natural light becomes the essential physical substance of the project, in contrast to the constant and unchanging nature of artificial lighting. It is a fundamental instrument of the spatio-temporal experience of architecture” (BYRNE, 2008: 8)

“The choice of materials, in particular the use of local basalt, with its roughness and geological weight, constitutes not only an aesthetic decision but also an ethical inscription” (Norberg-Schulz, 1979).

Concrete, cast in its original place, presents tonal variations that result from the composition of the aggregates and the action of seawater. The basalt stone, collected locally, is used in the pavements and in the transition zones, evoking the original floor of the salt pans. Steel, in turn, oxidises with the sea air, taking on a rusty tone that brings it closer to the earth and lava. About the materiality in Paulo David’s work, Gonçalo Byrne states that:

“The constituent parts of the different volumes are hierarchically arranged, which contributes to a remarkable unitary identity, often accentuated by the use of the same material in all surfaces, whether vertical or horizontal, as observed in some single-family houses and, more intensely, in larger projects” (BYRNE, 2008: 7, our transl.)

The structure of the pools takes advantage of the existing layout, minimising the need for deep excavations. Waterproofing is done with minimally invasive techniques, and the water circulation systems are passive whenever possible, allowing natural renewal with the tide. There is no visible machinery, no exposed technical systems: everything is buried or hidden. This ecological dimension of the project, although discreet, is central to its design. It is not an explicit ecological discourse; there are no didactic signage or interpretive panels. The gesture is silent, almost invisible, but effective. As Barbara Bogoni points out:

“Thus, Paulo David’s buildings resemble ‘millennial objects’, sedimentations and rocky concretions, a necessary consequence of the evolution of natural events, and perhaps they are ‘timeless objects that simultaneously contain history, present and future in the roughness of their basaltic surfaces. There is also an evident concern with the durability of the set. Wear and tear is not a problem, but a part of the process. Just as agricultural terraces age with dignity, swimming pools are also designed to resist, corrode, mark themselves, but without losing their function or beauty.” (BOGONI, 2023: 66)

The result is a space that does not age by obsolescence, but by sedimentation. An architecture that is wanted to be closer to the rocks than to the icons, in the words of Gonçalo Byrne:

“Paulo David’s architecture aspires to a certain timelessness, receptive and open, rooted in pre-existence, simultaneously projecting a radical openness, waiting for a regenerative life. It is a vital alternation between a projected archaeology and the desire to predispose oneself to an architecture eager for life and plenitude.” (BYRNE, 2008: 6, our transl.)

Paulo David’s architectural production, recognised with awards such as FAD and with the selection for the Mies van der Rohe, is based on a deep reflection on the island context. His conceptual approach, articulated in lectures, explores the dialectic between nature, which allows human occupation, and its force, which imposes a condition of impermanence. This tension materialises in the Salinas Complex, where architecture resists and, at the same time, yields to the ocean’s domination. This methodology was later applied to the urban scale in the Bay of Câmara de Lobos, where, according to Emílio Tuñon, the architect used the void as a design element to redefine and order the dense urban fabric.

David’s architecture is characterised by an intrinsic relationship with the land: he draws with the topography, excavates and designs to the rhythm of the slopes, dialogues with the sea and the winds. As Gonçalo Byrne observes:

“Paulo David appropriates the site as the raw material of the project, geometrizes the irregular profile of the cliff and defines a new field of formal reference that opens up to resignify the primitive character of the environment.” (BYRNE, 2008: 8, our transl.)

Below is the diagram presented in the exhibition “On the continuity of forms and the way they land” by Galeria Porta 33 in 2019, about the works of architect Paulo David. In the exhibition curated by Nuno Faria, the architect’s works are represented in summary diagrams.

“The redesign of the void, the subtle reconversion of what exists. A surgical incision plan, a process of taking care of the value of time and the fragility of the traces. An apnea requirement. A solid, serene Resistance.”  (BASTOS, 2019, our trans.) [1].

In architecture, “resistance” means transforming a space critically and carefully while respecting what already exists. The work of architect Paulo David on Madeira Island exemplifies this, as he investigates the territory and memory to create something more conscious. The international profile of his work is attested to by his participation in events such as the Venice Biennale. In 2016, he presented the installation “Inverted Ruins,” which explored how architecture can integrate into the historical and geological layers of a place. This presence on global stages reinforces the relevance of his approach in the contemporary architectural debate.

Paulo David’s influence extends beyond his projects to academia and consulting. His work as a consultant for the Funchal City Council and as a visiting professor at several universities demonstrates his commitment to knowledge sharing. Currently, as a guest professor at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, he shares his extensive practical experience with students, disseminating his architectural philosophy focused on contextual integration.

The practice of landscape architect João Gomes da Silva, developed over three decades, is recognised for its rigorous and conceptually demanding approach. His methodology, applied in reference projects such as the Tejo-Trancão Park and in collaborations with architects such as Paulo David and Álvaro Siza, views the landscape as a processual structure rather than a static scenario. This disciplinary thought, systematised in publications such as “The Order of Landscape”, is disseminated through his teaching activity in institutions such as IST and EPFL, and his work has been widely awarded and exhibited internationally.

Inês Norton, landscape architect and partner at Global, shares this same philosophy, in which the place holds the information for the projects. With a degree from the University of Évora, she combines ecological sensitivity with the rigour of contemporary design in his transdisciplinary practice. In co-direction with João Gomes da Silva, she develops projects that are based on a critical reading of the place and the design of resilient landscapes. Her work focuses particularly on the intersection between art, ecology and landscape, contributing to the disciplinary renewal of landscape design in Portugal through projects, teaching and publications.

She also worked with Paulo David on the São Vicente Caves complex. This complex is on the other side of Madeira Island. Even though it’s a very different project, it shares the same idea of using natural materials to blend the buildings with the landscape and plants.

Architecture criticism in Portugal has, in recent decades, expanded its analytical tools, increasingly incorporating the landscape, cultural, and geographical dimensions of projects. The case of the Salinas Swimming Pools, due to its specificity and subtlety, has attracted the interest of several authors who seek to read the project not only as built architecture but also as a cultural gesture.

For Gonçalo Byrne, Paulo David’s work is part of a lineage of architecture that has a residual connection with the modern but reveals a sensitive trace of Portuguese roots. Byrne states that Paulo David evidences “some traces of the Mediterranean and Portuguese practices, formally syncretic, particularly sensitive to locations and evidencing a landscaping potential” (BYRNE, 2008: 6, our transl.).

This parallelism with the levadas [2] is particularly fortunate in the context of the Salinas Pools, where the water and land paths intertwine on the slope. As in the levadas, the route does not impose but adapts.

Emílio Tuñón, in a text published in 2G magazine: “The complex represents a beautiful topographic recovery of the seafront, giving continuity to an existing circuit of paths, establishing social links between work and leisure spaces (TUÑON, 2008: 10, our transl).

These routes are understood not only as a leisure activity, but as an expression of the cultural relationship with the ocean, a fundamental interpretation in the island context. The symbolic value of water, as an element that structures the landscape, evokes the search for an almost ritualistic encounter with the sea, something present in the imagination of everyone on the island. The Atlantic character of the place imposes another scale, another regime of time and erosion. The architecture is not scenographic, but seismic.

João Gomes da Silva, in texts and conferences, has insisted on the idea that the landscape is, above all, a cultural construction. By intervening on the escarpment of Câmara de Lobos, the landscaper did not seek to “improve” nature, but to understand the history of the place: the walls, the terraces, the salt paths, the gestures of the fishermen. For Jocobo Garcia German in “The Landscapes of Robert Smithson”, the place ceases to be physical and becomes a timeline and memory. “Aiunar o real com lo imaginário” (blending reality and imagination) (GERMAN, 2002: 9). This position is echoed in several recent critical readings that reject the simplistic opposition between “natural” and “artificial”. In the case of the Salinas Swimming Pools, this opposition dissolves: the architecture emerges as a continuation of the landscape and the landscape, in turn, as an ancient cultural construction.

“Importantly, the cohabitation of the artefact with the dominant expressive force of the landscape lasts to this day. A landscape that struggles to resist even the recent and intense tourist colonisation.” (BYRNE 2008: 5, our transl.)

Another critical dimension that recurs in the project’s readings is its relationship with ruin. The state of abandonment of the old salt pans is incorporated into the new design. The logic is not that of historical reconstruction, but that of material continuity. This work on the ruin also calls for a reflection on time: the long time of the landscape, the brief time of architecture, the cyclical time of tides and seasons.

“Within the modern tradition and its epigones, Portuguese architecture has often been presented as the most solid guarantor of a resilient attitude, combining optimism about the ability to transform the world, based on very precise interventions in specific contexts, with a certain melancholy derived from the dilation in time of a transformation that can hardly leave the hand of architecture.” (TUÑON, 2008: 8)

The place takes on importance over time. Geological time, but also human time. The swimming pools are not a finished work, but an ongoing process. This procedural dimension of the project is part of its critical force. Unlike many tourist facilities that bet on planned obsolescence and an image of immediate impact, what is proposed here is an architecture that gains over time, that allows itself to be marked and corroded, that ages without losing dignity: “an architecture, in short, where time, not space, determines how we perceive human actions and their relations with nature” (TUÑOM 2008: 13, our transl.).

Bárbara Bogoni. proposing an ethical and temporal reading of Paulo David’s work:

“Architecture and Landscape. At the end of the design process, when time sets in, and vegetation takes root, the metamorphosis is complete, architecture becomes an intimate part of the landscape” (BOGONI 2023: 66).

“And they are manifestations of their need to belong to the place and to be a proponent of its evolution, far from the practice of formal and technological invention or any desire for self-affirmation and linguistic self-celebration, produced by the mediation between an abstract and minimalist poetics and the variety and complexity of the natural and anthropic elements that constitute their universe of reference” (BOGONI 2023: 66).

The Salinas Swimming Pools project in Câmara de Lobos can be interpreted, in light of Robert Smithson’s aesthetic theory, as a form of architecture that accepts and even summons entropy as part of its formal grammar. In this basaltic territory, where the spaces of the old salt pans are conflated with the limits of the new swimming pools, a logic is established: architecture does not seek to fix time but to allow it to pass.

Robert Smithson described entropy as “the systematic decline of differentiation and order into chaos.” However, the American artist did not regret this decline; rather, he saw it as a condition of the modern landscape, a landscape of residues, fragments, reconfigurations. In the famous series Monuments of Passaic, Smithson observes crumbling suburban infrastructures, bridges that no longer lead, and stairs that do not rise, and discovers in them the true poetics of the place.

Something similar can be said of the Salinas Pools: their value is not in their formal purity, but in their condition of reorganised ruin. The project does not aim to “correct” the previous landscape, nor to erase it in favour of a new order. On the contrary, the ruins of the salt pans, the worn steps, and the melancholy itself are integrated as design material. The new design inhabits the fragment, as if the architecture started from the zero point of entropy and, from there, negotiated a new form. Entropy, far from being a problem, is a thought hypothesis.

“Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the presupposition of the other. By choosing two items from the undisturbed store of natural things in order to designate them as ‘separate’, we have already related them to one another in our consciousness, we have emphasized these two together against whatever lies between them. And conversely, w can only sense those things to be related which we have previously somehow isolated from one another; things must first be separated from one another in order to be together.” (SIMMEL, 1994: 5, 1^st pub. 1909)

“To admit the paradoxical question of the meaning of coexistence in the reading of the integration of artifice over the natural, an exercise not uncommon in the discipline of architecture. This leads us to understand the landscape not as exhausted by what is there or by its permanence, but as a changeable understanding of its transformation into continuity. Conceiving the project beyond its place, which, however, conceives, designed beyond its limits” (DAVID, 2021: 29, our transl.)

“Volcanic ash generates numerous geological series that lead to the formation of crystals (slow) or amorphous basalt (fast), and Paulo David’s architecture is also materialised in delicate polyhedra whose crystalline or amorphous coatings are carefully inscribed in the space of the landscape and the city”. (SILVA, 2008: 71)

“I seek a new humanity in the project, which lies in humanity’s need to experience the continuity of the flow of time and integration with place. The search for continuity, therefore, moves from listening to the place to dissolving in the place, so that architecture becomes place” (DAVID apud BOGONI, 2021: 55)

“For a landscape architect, the goal is not merely to analyse cultural or ecological facts separately; it is to create spaces. Following Elizabeth Meyer’s idea, we must abandon the old divisions (such as culture/nature) and understand the landscape as a real, dynamic space rather than merely an image. In design, we use topology to understand the place in depth and as a tool to create spaces, combining technical knowledge and artistic sensitivity” (SILVA, 2023 :256).