Piscina das Marés

This guide to the Piscina das Marés follows a twenty-eight-year-old Álvaro Siza in 1960, handed the brief of making a violent stretch of Atlantic coast at Leça da Palmeira safe to swim, and his decision to work with the existing black rocks rather than flatten them. You'll walk the ramp he designed between blind concrete walls before the sea reappears, and hear how long the project took to finish and what happened to it decades later, including a theft and a national monument designation. Notice where the poured concrete and the rock blur into each other.