Not yet summer, the sky above Igualada Cemetery already glows violet-blue. Returning to this Barcelona suburb seven years later, I revisited architects Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós’ meditation on life and death.

Designed in the late 20th century, the cemetery emerged from a disused mining quarry in Igualada’s post-industrial landscape. Rather than levelling the terrain, Miralles and Pinós (then professional and marital partners) embedded burial walls into the earth, their geometries merging with wild vegetation – a rebirth of scarred land through cyclical symbolism. Though their partnership dissolved post-completion, Miralles’ 2000 interment here binds his legacy to the site, with admirers still leaving tributes.

Driftwood fragments set in concrete floors trace ephemeral paths, evoking life’s transience. Unfinished elements – a raw concrete chapel, rust-streaked steel – embrace impermanence, while colonising plants blur architecture and landscape.

Eschewing sepulchral solemnity, the cemetery balances introspection with vitality. Death here is neither sanitised nor obscured, but framed as an honest dialogue between memory and nature’s rhythms – less a terminus than architecture’s most poetic lesson in continuity.