The car park that dug up two thousand years
In Sevilla, Spain, a 1990 plan to build a market and car park on the Plaza de la Encarnación struck Roman floors and Moorish traces beneath the ground. The find froze the project for years, after 14 million euros had already been spent, before the Metropol Parasol, a timber canopy by architect Jürgen Mayer, finally opened above the exposed ruins in 2011.
A car park dig struck Roman and Moorish ruins
In 1990, Seville wanted to build a market on the Plaza de la Encarnación. The city also planned an underground parking garage. Workers started digging. They quickly hit Roman floors and walls. Below those lay traces of Ishbiliya, the Moorish city that ruled Seville before the Christian conquest of 1248. The find stopped the machines. Officials admitted the project could not go forward as planned. By then, the city had spent 14 million euros on a hole in the ground.
The plaza carried its own scars from more recent history. The Convento de la Encarnación was an Augustinian convent. It had stood on part of the site. French occupying authorities ordered it torn down in 1810 under Joseph Bonaparte. A prisoner was hanged there in 1799. This was unusual. Seville normally hanged people in the Plaza de San Francisco. By 2004, the plaza had sat empty for over a decade. Its Roman and Moorish past lay exposed. Nothing had been resolved. The city finally opened an international competition. Architects were asked what should rise above the site.
A Berlin architect's wooden canopy took years to build
Sixty-five architects entered the competition to redesign La Encarnación. The winner was Jürgen Mayer, a Berlin architect. He proposed six mushroom-shaped canopies made of laminated wood. They would rise 85 feet above the plaza. Their shape would echo the vaulted ceilings of the Seville Cathedral across town. Nothing like this had been built in Seville before. Below the canopies, the Roman and Moorish remains would stay in place. They would be housed in a museum called the Antiquarium rather than paved over and forgotten.
Construction started in 2005. The budget was 50 million euros. The finish date was set for mid-2007. It did not go that way. By 2007, the engineering firm Arup told the city the design was not buildable as drawn. Structural assumptions behind the giant timber lattice had never been tested. The wood pushed against limits nobody had verified. Engineers spent two years working out a fix. They developed a glued reinforcement system finished by early 2009. The final cost came to roughly 100 million euros. This was twice the original estimate.
The structure finally opened in March 2011. This was more than two decades after the first excavator broke ground. That digger was originally looking for nothing more than parking spaces.
A plague buried half a million dead in Seville
Long before any excavator touched this ground, the ground itself became a mass grave. The Great Plague of Seville swept through the city and killed roughly 500,000 people. It moved through neighborhoods without stopping, filling churchyards and convent floors faster than they could be dug. The plaza had no name for this catastrophe. But the dirt under the Metropol Parasol absorbed that death two centuries before anyone thought to dig a parking garage into it. The Roman walls and Moorish traces the diggers hit in 1990 were not the only layer this ground had buried and moved on from.
A French admiral's bones settled near this square
The dead were never far from this square. A French admiral named Luis de la Cerda died in 1348. His body was laid to rest at the Monasterio de Santa Inés. The convent was a short walk from where the excavators would later break ground. The convent still stands 132 feet from the plaza. His bones settled into the same earth that later held Roman Hispalis. A Moorish city called Ishbiliya was also buried there. His bones stayed there while the city built and rebuilt above him for six more centuries. Nobody exhumed him to make way for a market or a car park. The ground kept him and moved on to swallow the next thing.
French authorities razed a convent standing on this ground
The plaza had already been cleared once before the archaeologists ever arrived. An Augustinian convent occupied part of the site. It was called the Convento de la Encarnación. French occupying authorities ordered it demolished in 1810. They were acting under Joseph Bonaparte. The order came during the Peninsular War, when French administrators reorganized captured Spanish cities by decree. The convent came down, and the ground sat open. Almost two hundred years passed. A failed parking garage came. A frozen excavation followed. A Berlin architect's wooden canopy was built. Then something permanent stood there again. Authority had cleared this plaza before. It would do it again, just more slowly the second time.
The mushrooms shade a Roman floor, a demolished convent, and ground that has been cleared and rebuilt on more than once.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.