Leisure and holiday life intensify the enjoyment of nature and trigger new social relationships between people, inhabitants of shared open space. Home is not confined to a single environment, but is diluted among paths, lodgings and open pavilions in nature. Thus, the boundary between inside and outside expands, limits are blurred and properties disappear into the collective.
Originally, one of the paradigms of this way of life was campsites, ephemeral cities that appeared and disappeared, expanded and contracted, and changed their appearance according to the dynamics of their inhabitants, who were active participants in their informality. In short, they were places linked to circumstance, with attributes based on transformation and reversibility, capable of being transported and reinvented, but also of disappearing and becoming part of the landscape once again.
From the 1950s onwards, with great interest in the new possibilities for itinerant tourism, some architects turned to camping to embrace modernity. Ramon Tort and Francesc Mitjans designed the first campsites in the pine forests of the Llobregat delta, while Josep Maria Monravà, Antoni Bonet Castellana and Josep Puig i Torné, among others, designed campsites in the vicinity of Tarragona and along the Penedès coastline. Located in very diverse landscapes, these outstanding works share an experimentation with innovative and nature-friendly solutions, the result of interpreting the logic of local tradition.
This route offers the opportunity to recognise the role of informality and the passage of time in campsites, following the traces of the architecture that gave rise to them. Some of the works are still in use, while others have disappeared and been reclaimed by nature. However, it is still possible to identify some of the elements designed to shape the higher order that colonised the landscape and governed the informal occupations of the travelling inhabitants: from topographical adaptations with stone walls to groups of pavilions, bungalows, water tanks and advertising signs.
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