Some day in late autumn, each year, a window of around 6 months opens to carry out modest construction works to slowly transform this campsite, before the desired spring season opening day. Over the past years, a slow, gradual transformation has been developed by following these time frames. There is not ‘a project’ to be finished one day, but a collection of architectural strategies and infrastructural interventions than enhance an open-ended process of renovation. These strategies start by the construction of an artificial topography of new and old stepped terraces: walls, paths and platforms intended as quasi-permanent supports of Mediterranean gardens, pine tree forests and a diversity of terraces for holiday enjoyment; amongst the temporary appropriation of lightweight architectures—in the form of textile tents, pergolas and 24 new wooden bungalows. Topographical supports are built in mineral construction: concrete eroded by water and local ‘Sènia’ stone in a variety of formats —cut slabs, insert scraps, gravel and sand. Emerging from these traces, rammed-earth outdoor pavilions are conceived as wall thicknesses, offering comfortable shadows, colonnades and generous open-air rooms to turn everyday labours into pleasant vacation activities. At the entrance, two new central buildings shape a pathway towards the sea, in continuity of a sinuous descending street. Rather than objectual buildings, these preeminent edifices appear as ambiguous built ensembles where the same wall-architecture is crowned by ceramic pitch roofs, rendered volumes and chimneys, offering grand interior rooms for communal purposes and facilities. Next to the restaurant terrace, in front of a rocky shore, the project enhances the existing traces of a former inlet, urbanised and occupied by camping plots over fifty years ago. By reclaiming this cove with sand and an embedded swimming pool against a circular retaining wall, it intends to embrace the collective desire of enjoying a small beach sheltered from the sea.
