Qualla: Xanadu (Calp)

Xanadu (Calp): Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. The name arrives loaded with promise. Xanadu, the anglicised form of Shangdu, the summer capital where the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan kept his pleasure-palace, a word that centuries of poets turned into shorthand for somewhere opulent and impossibly far away. It belongs, improbably, to a dark green tower perched on a Calpe cliff above the Mediterranean. Ricardo Bofill's studio chose it deliberately, to lend an ordinary apartment block an air of mystery and wealth. The building has spent the decades since trying to live up to it.

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Xanadu (Calp): A Garden City in Space

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. Bofill completed Xanadu in 1968, at the height of a decade drunk on architectural utopias. He described his aim as building a garden city in space, and the tower's insistent verticality was meant to echo the great rock of the Penyal d'Ifac that looms further along the coast. The ...

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Xanadu (Calp): Built Around a Staircase

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. Everything in Xanadu hangs from its spine. The structure, some 2,300 square metres in all, is organised around a central staircase, with seventeen apartments attached module by module up its height. Because those modules sit on a square base, the stacking leaves gaps in the form;...

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Xanadu (Calp): A Name Borrowed from an Emperor

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. Why name a Spanish holiday flat after a Mongol capital? The choice was pure atmosphere. Kublai Khan's Xanadu had long since passed out of history and into legend, a byword for exotic splendour, and by borrowing it Bofill's studio dressed a modest cliffside block in borrowed grand...

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Xanadu (Calp): The Bofill Cluster

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. Xanadu does not stand alone. It rises in the Manzanera urbanisation on the edge of Calpe, alongside two more of Bofill's works: the celebrated Muralla Roja, with its maze of red and pink walls, and the Social Club of the Manzanera. Taken together they form a compact record of a y...

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Xanadu (Calp): Living in a Utopia

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marnal, CC0. Half a century on, Xanadu poses the question every architectural utopia eventually faces: what is it like to actually live inside one? The sealed voids that photograph so intriguingly are, from the inside, simply space that cannot be used. The modular ambition that thrilled the a...

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Image: Marnal | CC0