It must have been about 15 years ago. Rocío Sainz de Rozas (Seville, 1984) was in front of the Picasso Tower in Madrid. He had worked for the consulting firm Deloitte for four years. Graduated from ICADE and an expert in finance, she made a simple and difficult decision: not to enter. A great student, she had managed, while dedicating her time to numbers, to graduate remotely as an agricultural engineer. He believed in the countryside, nature, landscapes. He traveled through Europe. He worked for six months in London in a gravel garden. And, suddenly, the light. The garden expert, Juan von Knobloch, was his mentor. “He was very generous, he taught me all the secrets, the nurseries, the gardens in Spain and abroad,” he remembers. In 2015 he set up RSR with clients from Sotogrande and Marbella. Three started, now there are 17 professionals. The geography of his work covers Mallorca, the south of France, Marbella, Cádiz, Dubai, Kuwait. Projects, to name two, the Mandarin Hotel in Mallorca and the Formentor Hotel. It’s financial so the numbers are precise: in promotions, between 30% and 35% of the value comes from the gardens. But above all, the sales plan is shortened by 80%, thus finding the market sooner and at a better price. They offer the entire process. From the design of the garden, the selection of plants and lighting to the creation of bars and pergolas. “A garden is the same as a house, only on the outside,” he observes. It is difficult – emphasizes Santiago López, architect and head of Development and Real Estate of the private urbanization Sotogrande (Cádiz) – to set a percentage of revaluation because the value of the development is a set of elements: the facilities, the services, the architectural quality. «Although it is not an exaggeration to say that a luxurious development with a poor garden would be sold clearly below that same proposal with good landscaping.» In fact, the plant world—thinking about the numbers—“improves the moment of sale, but the processes are also streamlined: they are faster, the operation makes more sense and greater profitability,” lists the Italian-Spanish landscaper based in Ibiza Valerio Miragoli. And he adds: “We usually think about the square meter built, but not about the value of the environment where that square meter is located.” Miragoli got to know a German businessman who always began his promotions in Spain through the trees. It defends low-irrigation Mediterranean gardening, based on a wise selection of species, in accordance with the demands of climate change. «It is an essential part in the customers’ perception of quality. And it reaches the world of the senses, it is the changing colors, the smells, always evocative, that anchor you to a place. It is also the entry and exit door of a promotion,» describes Santiago López.
Less water consumption
“Today, a valuable garden must be sustainable in the first place, and that is only possible using plants capable of responding to the new climatic circumstances, which imply more heat and less rain,” says Elita Acosta, editorial director of the gardening magazine Verde es Vida. «That is to say, a true garden is not a mere green rectangle surrounded by flowering plants that persists as an archetype. Sustainable does not exclude ornamental beauty and good landscapers are demonstrating this. In Spain we are living in a brilliant era in naturalistic landscaping, which dispenses with large expanses of grass due to their high consumption of water and fertilizers, and non-adapted exotic species,» he maintains.
4,000 square meter garden by Valerio Miragoli for a real estate development in Campos, Mallorca. Miragoli Landscaping StudioIt is a break with a history of oblivion where the landscape seemed to belong only to Anglo-Saxon culture. It wasn’t something that the core promotion had dedicated a lot of resources to. “However, currently it is very difficult to talk about luxury and quality in a Spanish development without a good landscaping project,” says the Sotogrande expert. Traveling across this map of Spain (the second most mountainous in Europe), landscapers Olmo Rengifo and Enriqueta León have been creating gardens through their studio Planta Paisajistas, based in Madrid, since 2012. The most famous, near El Escorial, takes advantage of a slope on Mount Abantos and proposes a dance of white volumes, translucent glass and red Corten steel signed by the Aranguren Gallegos studio. In that house, called Szoke, the film The Room Next Door (2024) by Pedro Almodóvar was filmed. In the United Kingdom, where gardens have always been considered one of the most precious assets and gardening is a very widespread hobby, they calculate that they represent an extra 10% in the purchase price of the property. The Spanish couple creates a dozen gardens a year. There is a lot of work, especially in Madrid and Segovia. They have projects in the San Juan Reservoir, Talavera, Ayllón, Riaza and, further away, Ronda (Málaga). The gardens bloom like never before. They collaborate, among others, with the Blanes and Entresitio studios. The creation time ranges between two and three months, depending on the client’s “corrections.” “And for the property it represents a spectacular revaluation,” indicates Olmo Rengifo. In this grammar, one of those fixed names is Jesús Moraime, who has worked with the English giant Grosvenor, for whose real estate developments in Madrid he created secluded gardens. He started Biology, but he learned at a center on Alfonso “My specialty is reviving the Spanish garden tradition and updating it,” he says. He has a very ambitious project underway in the capital with Goya Real Estate. The revaluation of landscaping in an infrastructure? “It’s impressive,” he defends. Moraime is of the idea of incorporating productive crops in landscaping projects, for example vineyards. The geography is divided between Extremadura (where he has his own gardens on his livestock farm in La Vera, in Cáceres), the Balearic Islands and even Cantabria. The client is usually from Madrid with a hunting or recreational property. “But the definitive instrument was missing: the arrival of the investor from Latin America,” he concludes. Gardens take deep roots in Spain.
In the landscapes of the beech forests
Near the Fageda d’en Jordà (Hayedo de Jordà), in Olot, about 60 kilometers from Girona, in the vicinity of El Croscat, the last volcano to erupt on the Iberian Peninsula, 17,000 years ago, the RCR studio, created in 1988 by Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta (RCR), challenges the narrative: they “do not design buildings, but landscapes.” These days when the leaves of the beech trees are torn between reddish and golden as they slowly undulate towards the ground attracted by gravity, it is easy to understand. They start from blank paper. And they create places. A house for a hairdresser. A house for a blacksmith. In Olot. Or a skyscraper in Dubai. “But they are all landscapes”—they admit—“we don’t build buildings.” They work on another scale.
