Parks and gardens 2: Bonaval

Santiago is a city of stone, a granite grey city drenched by the rain, or a golden city when the stone reflects the summer sun ... The topic remains and pilgrims won’t be disappoint when comes to the historic area, but the scrupulous care that there levied on each floor or bed of small squares and cloisters, they will announce a parallel reality: the green city, huge parks and gardens, thanks to secular gardens of monasteries and respect for their municipality for its facet " rural ", today embrace the heart of Compostela.

The new landscaping is allied with history in Bonaval Park

 

 

This park is in the district of San Pedro, the natural entrance to the city for pilgrims who walk the French Way and the roads of the North. Originally the park was the old cemetery and garden of the Dominican monastery and today is without any doubt one of the most attractive and popular parks in the city.

The space was transformed into a park in 1994 following a design by the Portuguese architect and landscape Alvaro Siza, also author of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art which flanking it. The result has been an extraordinary fusion of architectural and ethnographic remains with manicured gardens, lawns and old areas of forest along the said CGAC and the Galician People Museum, located on the premises of the former monastery.

If you access to it from the entrance located between the two museums, you will cross areas gently sloping lawn. In this first area is the presence of the sculpture "Porta da Música" by Eduardo Chillida, as well as some ancient trees of yours that are among the oldest trees in Galicia.

Through various ramps and stairways you can access to a serie of terraces where the lawns are together with care pebbles and colored spots. Thus we reach the highest part of the park, a wooded area or oakwood, from which you can access to the area of ​​the old cemetery, consisting of a wooded area with beautiful views of the monastery church and the historic town. Galician students frequented more and more this part of the park, particularly the large community of foreign students, European arrivals through the Erasmus program, Brazilians, Americans ... That fill the space with all kinds of activities and musical sounds. At the bottom of this space, at the height of the church and convent buildings, you can see the remains of the cemetery consolidated.