La Espiñeira by Antonio Palacios: Galician Village or Siedlung?

Abstract

The “Project for the Construction of the Workers’ Settlement of La Espiñeira” in Santiago de Compostela, which Antonio Palacios submitted to the Galician Regional Fund for Social Welfare in 1930, suggests that the repeated references to the “aldea gallega” (Galician village) in reports, articles, and lectures of the period concealed an accurate understanding of contemporary European workers’ settlements, specifically the German Siedlungen. Palacios approached the project by combining the definition of the morphology of the Galician village presented by Nicolás Tenorio in his book on the subject—and its foreseeable, if deliberate, regionalist intent—with a constant appeal to workers and to the hygienic principle that should govern their homes, implicitly placing it within that interwar European context. In doing so, he demonstrated his ability to distinguish it from his other architectures—those of metropolitan Madrid and Vigo—fully aware of the power of language to identify a specific ideological, or at least cultural, current.