Ruins and Sacred Stones in the Spanish Hinterland

This project began while travelling through remote regions of inland Spain.

Scattered across the vast landscape are ruins, sacred stones, abandoned monuments, forgotten industrial structures, and fragments of architecture that have outlived the worlds that produced them. Some remain connected to local traditions and collective memory; others survive as isolated presences whose original meaning has become uncertain or obscured by time.

What drew me to these places was not their historical importance, but their continued existence. Many are little known, rarely visited, and largely absent from official narratives.
Yet they remain in the landscape, neither fully preserved nor completely erased.

Taken over by vegetation, weather, and time, these structures exist in an ambiguous state between disappearance and persistence. Some blend almost seamlessly into their surroundings, while others appear strangely out of place, as if they belonged to another era—or perhaps to an imagined future.

Photographed under neutral light and with an observational approach, the images focus on form, materiality, and location. A prehistoric ritual stone, a ruined hermitage, a Roman mausoleum, an abandoned tower, or an isolated architectural fragment can all be encountered within the same visual framework.

The project is guided by a simple question:Why weren’t they completely erased from the landscape?
What compels us to leave them standing? 

Rather than providing answers, the photographs invite a contemplation of time, memory, and the traces left behind by successive generations. Together they form a portrait of a landscape where history, myth, religion, and human ambition continue to coexist within the present.

This body of work became the starting point for the broader project Persistent Forms, which later expanded to other regions of Europe.