In 1973, Ricardo Bofill completed a residential building on the cliffs of Calpe that was so visually arresting it would take the internet fifty years to fully lose its mind over it. Its labyrinthine staircases inspired the set designers of Squid Game. Its rooftop pool, painted in shades of cobalt and violet, looks less like a swimming facility and more like a hallucination.
And since 2019, access has been restricted to residents and their guests - meaning that the tens of thousands of people who have gazed at it longingly from outside can no longer simply walk in. Staying here, in other words, is the only way in.
Location
Calpe is a mid-sized town on the Valencian coast, about halfway between Valencia and Alicante, best known for the Peñón de Ifach - a 332-meter (1,089-foot) limestone outcrop that erupts from the sea like a geological exclamation mark.
La Muralla Roja sits within the La Manzanera development on the town's southern edge, perched above a rocky cove where the Mediterranean meets the base of dramatic coastal cliffs. The setting is not incidental to the building's design: Bofill conceived the structure as something that grows from the landscape rather than interrupting it, and the surrounding panorama of sea, salt flats, and mountains makes that intention legible in a way no photograph quite manages.
A Catalan Architect and a Fortunate Connection
The story of La Muralla Roja begins, like many architectural surprises, with a fortunate connection. The land at La Manzanera belonged to a Catalan landowning family, the Ortenbach Feliu, whose daughter married Manuel Palomar, then Secretary of the Barcelona city council. Palomar had ties to Emilio Bofill, Ricardo's father, and it was through this chain of relationships that Ricardo Bofill - then in his late twenties - first came to Calpe. He was immediately taken with the site.
La Muralla Roja in 1973
Bofill had founded his practice, Taller de Arquitectura, in 1963 at the age of 23, with an unusually multidisciplinary vision: architects, engineers, sociologists, writers, and filmmakers working together on designs with an explicit social and political purpose.
La Muralla Roja, conceived from the mid-1960s and completed in 1973, belongs to the earliest and arguably most radical phase of that project - before the firm's later turn toward postmodern classicism in concrete. It has since been ranked among Bofill's ten most iconic works.
The building's inspiration is explicitly North African. Bofill referenced the casbahs of the Arab Mediterranean world - fortress-like settlements that follow the contours of rocky terrain, organized around interlocking courtyards and passages rather than conventional streets.
At La Muralla Roja, that logic is reinterpreted through the geometry of the Greek cross: the plan is built from thirteen cross-shaped modules with approximately 5-meter (16-foot) arms, with service towers positioned at the intersections. The result is a structure that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely alien.
Geometry, Color and Optical Tricks
The complex holds 50 apartments across five interconnected sections, in three configurations: studios of around 60m² (645 sq ft), two-bedroom apartments of around 80m² (860 sq ft), and larger three-bedroom units of around 120m² (1,290 sq ft). Kitchens and bathrooms occupy the intersections of the cross structures; living spaces extend along the arms. The staggered, compartmental massing gives the whole thing a quality that hovers between brutalist and something older and harder to name.
What makes La Muralla Roja unique, though, is color. The exterior walls are painted in several tones of red and pink - not to match the landscape, but to contrast with it, the warm tones set against the grey of the cliffs and the blue of the sea.
Step inside, and the palette shifts: courtyards and staircases are painted in blues, indigos, and violets, calibrated to blur visually into the sky above. The effect is not decorative in any conventional sense. It's closer to optical - the building seems to expand and dissolve at its own edges, and the intensity of the Mediterranean light does the rest.
Architects at the University of Alicante, who staged an exhibition on the building in 2012, noted that the colors only make sense with Mediterranean light, which amplifies them.
The interior courtyards and open passages serve a double function: they bring natural light deep into each apartment, and they create the semi-public, semi-private threshold spaces that Bofill associated with traditional Mediterranean and North African communal living. The boundary between inside and outside, private and shared, is deliberately blurred.
The Apartment
The loft sits on the garden level - one of several floors that could reasonably be called "ground" given the building's cascading, cliff-hugging structure - and covers 70m² (753 sq ft), accommodating two people. The terrace is large, and given the position within the complex, it connects directly to the building's layered outdoor spaces.
Inside, the apartment has a king-size bed, a fully equipped kitchen, a bathroom with a rain shower, and a 65-inch 4K television paired with a 7.1 surround sound system.
The host, Hans Wollnitza, is a German-born architect who settled in Calpe in 2012 - so the attention to the space feels considered rather than accidental.
On the Roof
The solariums and pool up here are for residents and their guests only - no day passes, no exceptions - and they sit within the building's upper geometry in a way that makes the surrounding architecture feel like a frame rather than a backdrop.
The pool is painted in the same deep blues that run through the interior courtyards, and with the sea visible beyond the parapet, the water seems to continue indefinitely outward.
It is the kind of place that makes the concept of "going for a swim" feel faintly absurd as a description of what you're actually doing.
Partida Manzanera, 3, A-14, 03710 Calp, Alicante, Spain
