The dream of building a university campus

The Estudio General de Navarra was founded by St Josemaría Escriva in 1952. The Law program started with 8 professors and forty four students, in the old Camara de Comptos Reales, a 14th-century Gothic building, on loan from the Provincial Council of Navarre. From then onwards, the first Schools of the University began to establish themselves in a range of buildings in Pamplona city center.

In 1960, the Estudio General de Navarra officially became a university, and was granted some land for the development of a real university campus.  Pamplona Town Hall (led by Mayor Miguel Javier Urmeneta) gave 130 hectares of land in the Sadar River valley, to the south of Pamplona: the City Council owned some land in the area and would facilitate the sale of the rest of the land to the University of Navarra. 

This is how the building of the campus began in 1960.

Like much of the Pamplona Basin, the landscape of the future campus comprised fields for cereal crop growth and some orchards, divided into many separate plots.  There were a few narrow tree-lined roads and the trees along the river, along the Sadar Road, and the Lombardy poplars near the Fuente del Hierro were a striking feature. In addition, there were a variety of buildings – up to 113 in total, over time – dotted over the 130 hectare space.

Converting this land into a campus meant beginning from zero.

Simple solutions were sought from the beginning in order to maintain the campus: lawns and meadows proved the most cost-effective options to ensure a beautiful landscape.

Order, balance, sobriety and simplicity were the goals. Terrain morphology was respected as far as possible, softening slightly only some slopes; lawns and meadows sown and tended; and some spaces opened up to shape the architectural personality of the campus. The campus was designed to reflect and respond to the changing seasons and rhythms of the year.

Conifer trees were first planted because they are evergreen, and their range of greens would contrast with the austerity of the winter season in the eyes of university students and staff (today there are about nine hundred on campus).

In addition, the plan aimed to offset the sharp pyramidal shapes of such conifers with the rounded or pendulous shapes of other deciduous trees. The green tones were completed with flowering trees and shrubs, and the autumnal tones of lindens, maples, beeches, poplars and ginkgos.

The key to designing the campus was to plant noble, slow-growing trees with good wood at the right distances (and without being unnerved by the initial effect of empty space); clusters of three, five or seven specimens; and to play with the personality of the particular species.

That is how the campus developed little by little.  Today, the buildings occupy an area of 77,773m2. The wheat fields of the past have been transformed into a university campus with 4,200 trees, including 100 sequoias.