The restoration of the Bassa Nova in Reus, designed by Gallego Arquitectura, transforms a forgotten hydraulic infrastructure into a climate refuge and a meeting point between nature and the city. Once a key part of the city’s water system, the site has been reimagined as a public landscape that restores both its environmental and social functions.
The project combines careful heritage restoration with a contemporary landscape intervention that embraces the irregular topography and traces of the old basin. Through this dialogue between past and present, the Bassa Nova becomes an open space where climate comfort, collective use, and memory coexist.
Within this renewed landscape, prefabricated concrete elements by Durbanis play a distinctive role. The Islands and Little Island models are inserted into the terrain as monolithic volumes of variable geometry, subtly emerging from the ground. Their abstract shapes act as landscape punctuation, defining circulation and creating opportunities for play, rest, or spontaneous gathering. They invite users to climb, sit, or simply follow the curved paths that weave between them, turning the former water reservoir into a dynamic and inclusive public space.
The intervention evokes the memory of water—its containment, flow, and evaporation—through a composition that feels simultaneously natural and artificial. Vegetation, mineral surfaces, and concrete volumes coexist in a balanced ecosystem that moderates temperature and offers shade and comfort in the Mediterranean climate.
Built with durable materials and guided by a restrained design language, the project demonstrates how urban design can mediate between heritage and contemporary life. The Bassa Nova exemplifies a new type of civic landscape: open, adaptable, and rooted in its context. It reconnects Reus with its original landscape identity and transforms an obsolete piece of infrastructure into a vibrant public space capable of fostering ecological awareness, social interaction, and urban resilience.
Edited by Durbanis
Photography by Joan Guillamat
