As part of a larger regional project intended to bring back life, heritage and tourism to the depopulated area around the Aragón River in Northeastern Spain, Zaragoza-based Sebastián Arquitectos has restored a small stone chapel outside the hamlet of Ruesta. The hermitage of San Juan de Ruesta was originally built in the 12th century; it was known for its significant collection of Romanesque paintings before the artwork was removed in the early 1960s, when a pharaonic reservoir and dam were built nearby, hastening the area’s decline.
In 2001, in an act that Sergio Sebastián Franco, founder of the architecture practice, calls “cruel and unnecessary,” the local government demolished part of the chapel’s roof and walls and...
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In Spain, a sensitive restoration by Sebastián Arquitectos renews the life of an ancient chapel.