Presidential complex in Galicia. Official residence of the President of Galicia

The city of Santiago de Compostela is much more than its historic centre. The historic site we have today is an extraordinary synthesis, a product of history, of random chance understood in the context of its history. His surprising personality is largely due to the perfect coexistence of aspects that appear to be opposites and sometimes contradictory. The city, impregnated with the ruralism that enveloped it for centuries, has always projected an extraordinary degree of urbanity. Its Romanesque and Baroque monuments are a repository of culture and illuminate the city.

Over a medieval structure

A neoclassical image is created in the design of its residential buildings which, on a small scale and with extensive, rich variety, fill the gaps left between the grand baroque monuments of the revitalized convent city. We are constantly presented with the small, the variable andthe grand scale of the monument. The everyday, the local vis-à-vis the universal and cosmopolitan. Its canal-like streets are inserted into the rural space of orchards, linking the built volumes with the natural world in an admirable way and gaps were left over this reality:the “outeiros”; the series of empty hills: Caias, Viso. Sta Susana, Monte Pío, Pedroso... places that constantly enrich this tense dialogue between the built mineral and the vegetative emptiness, the geographical and the historical, with their own emptiness.

And this is the city today. Its empty hills are realities, I dare say monuments that converse with the buildings and give them meaning. It would not be Santiago without them. On one of these hills, where the so-called Finca Monte Pío, the former headquarters of the Geographic Cadastral Institute, is located, the official residence of the President of the Xunta de Galicia is plannedThe official residence of the President of the Xunta de Galicia is designed on one of these hills, where the former headquarters of the Geographic Cadastral Institute called the “finca de Monte Pío” is currently located.