In basalt stonework, tiled cover over wood structure and painted wood window frames, so is the traditional image rebuilt. With low volumes, long and broken, crowned by metallic elements, so is contemporaneity introduced.

Close to the Estrada Regional that links Madalena to S. Roque, and in the periphery of the Bandeiras’ main nucleus, an abandoned road going towards the mountain gives access to a small sized terrain where the different structures used to meet in ruins.

From the former construction, as surviving elements of the passage of time and earthquakes, remained a warped façade with a window overlooking the street, some unsurprising stairs, a chimney on top of a wall and a counter; similar to many others and unique in the site’s mystique.

Among the fallen stones and the spontaneous vegetation, one can find thresholds, jambs, stonework and the pig place, remarkable in its functionality and perfect in its shape and implementation.

This was the reality a few years ago, depressed and depressing to those that saw an island populated with twice the number of people, and that the eruptive cycle of the Capelinhos volcano, in the neighboring island of Faial, had scared off.

A place to reorganize, without both the asset and the tyranny of the sea, open to the imagination and the challenge of a natural setting geometrized by man and torn apart by eruptions.

Taking advantage of the image of the main building and the pre-existing construction, two buildings were designed, housing three one-bedroom residential units and a common area around the pigsty, thus creating a small tourist complex where the traditional architecture’s constructional elements are continuously reinterpreted with more or less freedom.

As a result from this game, small but significant differences between the buildings, coupled with the continuance of volumes, of scale and of function, keep the memory of the place’s hierarchical structure alive.

Open to São Jorge and facing Pico Mountain, the small residential units connect differently with the outside, through private or semi-private areas, grassed or paved, all of which are delimited by stone walls that hide or drive the eye towards partial sights of proximity, or global sights on the horizon.

Vineyards in corrals delimit the territory to the north, introducing the necessary transition between a leisure landscape and the rural landscape, naturalized by abandonment and by the goats grazing in the neighboring lands.

And of all this a place to stay and live in the memory of the site was born.