04 / 16LandscapeLeiria, Portugal
A worked-out limestone quarry turned into a public garden: terraces, a stair to the water and one small pavilion. · Built
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Facts
The quarry on the edge of Leiria was worked for limestone until the good beds ran out. What remained was a pit of 38 500 m², cut in benches down to a floor that had begun to fill with spring water. The Fundação Pedreira Velha took it on to make a public garden, and asked us to change no more than the town's safety required.
Ingrid Solberg led the project from the first site walk. We began with a measured survey of every face and bench, and the terraces follow the last benches the quarrymen cut. Where a bench was too narrow to walk, we widened it with recovered limestone from the spoil heaps, laid dry. Where it was sound, we left it alone. The site plan (A-201) is mostly the quarry's own geometry with one path drawn through it.
New concrete appears only where something has to be retained or walked on. Beside it the rock keeps its drill marks, so the two kinds of cutting, theirs and ours, sit side by side. Tomás Varela, who trained as a stonemason, chose which faces to leave untouched.
From the upper terraces a single stair goes down to the water: 112 concrete steps between limestone walls. On the wall side no handrail is needed. On the open side a weathering-steel rail runs the full length. Vasco Ferraz Engenharia founded the stair directly on the benches, so in section (S-301) it reads as one more cut in the rock.
Spring water has filled the lowest bench to 4 m. We did not drain it. The stair stops at a broad landing just above the water line, and on summer evenings it is where people sit with their feet in the water.
The quarrymen had already drawn the garden. Our work was deciding which of their lines to keep.
The only building on the site is a pavilion of 640 m² on the highest bench, at the level of the town. It holds a café, toilets, a room for school groups and the foundation's office. Its roof is a concrete slab on limestone walls, and its glass faces into the pit, so the first view from the street is the whole quarry at once. The east elevation (E-401) shows the pavilion at the rim and the benches falling away below it.
The garden opened in 2017. Field Office Landscape kept the planting sparse and drought-tolerant, seeded into the joints of the benches. Much of what grows there now arrived on its own, and the foundation has learned to leave most of it where it lands.
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Site plan of Pedreira Steps at 1:500. Walls in solid black (400 mm concrete), openings as breaks with glazing lines, structural grid lettered and numbered; spaces: upper terrace, middle terrace, lower terrace, quarry pool, pavilion.
Drawing set · 5 sheets
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