Santa-Cruz Arquitectura Wraps a Multigenerational Jumilla Winery in a Contemporary Skin

Viña Elena is not a single building. It is a palimpsest: a rural dwelling of uncertain date, a winery from 1948, additions from the 1950s and 1970s, and a further expansion around 2000, all layered onto the same parcel outside Jumilla in Spain's Murcia region. The Pacheco family built each piece as the business demanded it, and the result was an honest but incoherent cluster of volumes that had gradually fallen out of active use. Santa-Cruz Arquitectura was tasked not with demolition or reinvention but with something harder: turning the entire 469-square-meter complex into a visitor destination, restaurant, and museum of the winery's own origins, without erasing the architectural evidence of those successive generations.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the strategy of wrapping rather than replacing. A lightweight contemporary envelope, part steel-tube trellis and part new roofing, drapes over the existing fabric, binding disparate structures into a single legible whole while letting the original walls, floors, and roof tiles remain visible beneath. The result is a building that reads simultaneously as old and new, with neither register canceling the other. Selected for the XVI Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism and awarded the 12th Regional Architecture Prize of Murcia, Viña Elena stands as a persuasive argument for treating vernacular complexity as an asset rather than a problem.

The Contemporary Canopy

The most visually striking move is the new roof structure that cantilevers over the traditional clay-tile eaves. White tubular steel trusses form a light, almost skeletal canopy that hovers above the old cornices of tejas bocacachas, the curved tiles typical of Murcian popular architecture. The gesture is respectful but unambiguous: the new material refuses to mimic the old, establishing a clear chronological boundary. From below, the ridged white surface reads as clean and industrial; from the ground, the projection creates shadow lines that soften the meeting of old masonry and new steel.

Structurally, this technological roof does more than unify. It introduces clerestory-level ventilation and controlled daylight into spaces that were originally built for grain storage and grape-picker lodging, not for visitors lingering over a tasting. The tree-like supports visible inside allow long spans without bulky columns, keeping the original room geometries intact beneath.

Exposed Layers Inside

Step inside and the archaeological sensibility becomes clear. Stone wall fragments, grain counting marks, and original load-bearing masonry are left exposed between freshly plastered white surfaces. Wrapped columns sit beneath the new truss roof, making the structural dialogue literal: old stone carries gravity while the new steel carries light and air. The polished concrete floor in the gallery space is deliberately neutral, a stage on which the rough textures of the inherited walls can perform.

The architects musealized an excavation within the original winery, revealing early twentieth-century winemaking installations and folding them into the visitor route. It is a bold choice, treating a family's working infrastructure with the seriousness normally reserved for Roman ruins. But in a denomination of origin like D.O.P. Jumilla, where terroir is a marketing word and a geological fact, making the physical history of production visible feels entirely appropriate.

Timber Ceilings and Inherited Character

The dining area and several interior passages retain their original timber ceiling beams, reinforced underneath with new concrete slabs and connectors but left visually dominant. Afternoon light rakes across these beams in the dining room, turning lunch into a lesson in material aging. Nearby, geometric patterned floor tiles, likely from the mid-century additions, survive intact and set the chromatic tone for each room.

A passage flanked by white plaster walls and a wooden barrel next to historic tools reads almost like a curated exhibit, yet it functions as everyday circulation. This is the project's recurring trick: collapsing the distinction between museum and working hospitality space. Visitors walk through history on their way to a table or a tasting bar, encountering carpentry, cornices, and grain marks as ambient texture rather than roped-off artifacts.

The Green Facade as Bioclimatic Infrastructure

In the courtyard, suspended cable planters support climbing vines that will, over time, form a living screen across the white walls. This green facade is not decorative filler; in Jumilla's semi-arid continental climate, with summer temperatures routinely above 35°C, vegetated shading is a serious passive cooling tool. The steel-cable framework lets the plants grow freely while keeping the structural envelope dry and ventilated, a detail that matters for a building made largely of old masonry and timber.

The strategy extends between the various buildings, turning what were once leftover gaps into shaded outdoor zones for visitors. By treating landscape as architecture and architecture as landscape, Santa-Cruz Arquitectura reduces mechanical cooling loads and introduces biodiversity with native species. It is a practical response to the climate emergency that also happens to look good on a wine label.

Plans and Drawings

The elevation drawings reveal the full ambition of the green facade strategy: geometric perforated screens punctuate the new envelope, calibrating light and air entry while integrating planting pockets at multiple levels. Reading the three facades together, you can trace the dialogue between existing rooflines and the new steel canopy, seeing exactly where the contemporary skin detaches from the old masonry to create shadow gaps and ventilation channels. It is a controlled, almost surgical overlay on a cluster of buildings that were never designed to be read as a unified composition.

Why This Project Matters

Wine tourism architecture often defaults to one of two modes: nostalgic pastiche or spectacle-driven novelty. Viña Elena refuses both. By preserving the authentic disorder of multigenerational construction and layering a legible contemporary framework over it, Santa-Cruz Arquitectura proposes a third path, one where architectural honesty and commercial ambition coexist. The 469-square-meter rehabilitation proves that a modest footprint can carry real intellectual weight when the design decisions are precise and the heritage is treated as a collaborator rather than an obstacle.

For a region like Jumilla, whose wines are gaining international recognition, the project also offers a model of place-based branding that goes beyond signage and label design. The grain marks on the walls, the exposed excavation, the surviving floor tiles: these are not curated props but the genuine material record of a family's relationship with this land. Wrapping them in a contemporary skin does not diminish that record. It amplifies it, giving visitors a reason to linger and the Pacheco family a built argument for why provenance matters.

Viña Elena Winery by Santa-Cruz Arquitectura. Jumilla, Murcia, Spain. 469 m². Completed 2022. Photography by David Frutos Photography.

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