BEST PAPER AWARD | Healthy Architecture & City

TIRANA / April 20, 2024

The paper presented at the International Conference Defensive Architecture of the Mediterranean Coast FORTMED 2024, entitled:Survey and spatial analysis of the Garganta del Ciervo dam and the landscape irrigated by the Andalusi Albuhera reservoir (12th century), has won the BEST PAPER AWARD:

The authors are Santiago Quesada-García and María Lozano Gómez, researchers from the Healthy Architecture & City research group. The study of historic dams and water reservoirs is a little-explored field, unevenly addressed by historiography, architecture, and civil engineering, possibly because most of these remains are isolated and dispersed in rural areas and places that are difficult to access. This circumstance, among others, makes it difficult for them to be adequately known and leads to a lack of graphic analysis of these types of hydraulic infrastructures and the landscapes associated with them. This work presents one of the few known examples of Andalusi storage dams or reservoirs. Its survey is approached not as an isolated object or remain but as an inseparable part of the landscape it is part of. To this end, a specific methodology is

designed that geo-references the data, constructs a digital terrain model and topographical surveys with use of UAV, and ends with a 3D reconstruction of the preserved remains, characterising them with a dense point cloud. The results obtained shed light on a mediaeval landscape irrigated by an Albuhera, or “small sea” of water, dammed by the Garganta del Ciervo dam, a river barrier built with stone edges and lime in
the mid-12th century in the Sierra de Segura de Jaén (Spain).