Hotel Ribeira Grande is located in Ribeira Grande in São Miguel island, Azores.

The Azorean islands are one of those places where our primitive side awakens! Risk, adrenaline, beauty are a combination that causes us a constant, instinctive alert.

On the ground we feel we are on an island. This sense of limit emphasizes the need for intimacy, modesty, recollection, protection, but in continuity with a stimulating landscape, where the forces of nature create a visceral attraction. In the place, the cliff blends with the beach, the softness of the surrounding agricultural structures and the mountainous relief of the volcanoes, imposing and always present in the landscape, the waves, the sound of the waves, and the infinite ocean under the stars on clean nights.

The project was inspired by this landscape. The pattern of agricultural structures as a disciplining element, the tea plantation lines that organize paths and spaces of intimacy next to each house, the walls of volcanic stone as elements of protection and construction, stand on the ground like wave and foam of the sea; receding, advanced, high, low, undulating, in contrast to the straight stiffness of the rock.

It is proposed a landscape that is built in itself and in relation to the surrounding, because a minimum construction density is recommended in terms of program, which requires a careful management of neighborhood relations, where the construction will be part of the landscape that we want to see.

The interior spaces, such as the magma, create gaps in the solidified surfaces, expanding continuously to the outside. So between the inner space and outer spaces there is no obvious limit. The materials used inside, warm and comfortable extend to the outside, fusing into the stone.

Each room, each room, each space becomes a "fireplace" wrapped in black rock. The buildings, with more density near the beach and the cliff, diminish their quantity more and more in the interior, until they disappear ...