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Bell-lloc Winery

A winery buried in the soil that grows its grapes — an underground cellar of rusted steel and stone set between the vineyards and the woods at Palamós.

A cellar for one estate

Bell-lloc was commissioned as cellars for the private production and tasting of wine, on an estate at the mouth of a valley at Palamós on the Costa Brava, at the foot of a protected mountain area. The site sits between the working landscape of the vineyards and the wilder landscape of the woods, and RCR Arquitectes — the Catalan trio Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta — answered by putting the building in neither: they put it underground, where the two landscapes meet.

Descending between steel sheets

The visit is the architecture. A path defined by tilted sheets of recycled steel — weathering Cor-ten that rusts to the colour of the soil — funnels you down from the surface, slits between the plates letting in blades of daylight. The slats admit air and even rain as well as light, so the shadows inside are in constant slow motion. In the laboratory, the folded metal roof and inclined walls open into one large window aimed at the forest, tying the working cellar back to the landscape above it. Below ground, the same inclined steel forms vaulted spaces for the work of wine: the production area with its steel vats, barrels suspended above the floor, bottles in racks, a laboratory, and finally the tasting room. Stone and steel are almost the entire material palette, and the geometry — folded roofs, leaning walls, a large window in the laboratory framing the forest — keeps the underground world in conversation with the one above.

Climate without machines

Wine wants cool, stable darkness, and the earth provides it free. By excavating the cellars into the ground, the design uses the soil’s thermal inertia for natural climate control, removing the need for energy-hungry mechanical cooling. The building is less an object placed on the estate than a piece of the estate folded open — the Pritzker jury later praised exactly this, describing a building “about the soil that produces the grapes, the cool dark cellars needed for the ageing of wine and the colour and weight of the earth.”

The Pritzker connection

A decade after Bell-lloc was finished, in 2017, RCR Arquitectes won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture’s highest honour. Aranda, Pigem and Vilalta had founded the practice in their hometown of Olot in 1988, a year after graduating from the Vallès school of architecture, and had worked on almost nothing but the landscapes of their own region since. The prize’s own materials list the winery among the works that defined the practice — a small private cellar, mostly invisible from the surface, carrying weight at the very top of the profession.

Sources

• Pritzker Architecture Prize — 2017 laureates media kit (PDF)
• ArchDaily — underground architecture in Ibero-America
• Dezeen — key projects by RCR Arquitectes
• World Architecture — key projects of RCR Arquitectes

Restored in 2026 for the Urbarama Architecture Archive. This was one of the original Urbarama project profiles, and it is back because other publications still link to it — in this case, Look At Me’s profile pages.

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Harrison Alley is a web publisher and data enthusiast based in Dallas, Texas. He built Urbarama’s remodeling calculators and maintains them.

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