Casa de Campo is one of the largest urban parks in Europe. Yet it is far more than a recreational space for the people of Madrid. This vast green expanse is a living palimpsest of the city’s history, where layers of culture, biodiversity, and urban life intertwine. With its unique mix of natural and human elements, Casa de Campo becomes a true urban laboratory, an ideal site for exploring landscape dynamics and human interaction. At the heart of this living structure lies a key, yet often overlooked, feature: its hydrographic system.

Winding quietly for 15 kilometers from west to east, the Meaques stream flows through the park like a hidden vein. Though invisible in everyday life, it silently witnesses the evolving narratives that unfold along its banks. Despite forming part of a well-known territory, the stream and its surroundings have remained largely underexplored in terms of in-depth landscape analysis. This paradox of proximity without deep knowledge makes it a fertile ground for uncovering the subtle emotional, social, and ecological dynamics that emerge through human encounters with nature, especially in the wake of the pandemic. How, then, might we begin to read this elusive and suggestive terrain?

One promising approach lies in the practice of contemplative walking. As J.R.R. Tolkien once observed, “not all those who wander are lost.” Rooted in the psychogeographic experiments of the Situationist movement, this practice invites a drift through space led not by maps or purpose, but by sensation, emotion, and chance. It reveals forgotten corners and latent meanings embedded in the landscape. Alongside this, the attentive observation of the ordinary opens up a phenomenology of the everyday, allowing us to register small gestures, fleeting encounters, and subtle nonhuman rhythms that shape our presence in the world—moments that usually pass unnoticed, yet deeply structure our experience of place.

The concepts of the Third Landscape and heterotopia offer further lenses through which to approach the Meaques stream. Gilles Clément’s notion of the Third Landscape draws attention to marginal, unmanaged spaces, zones often dismissed, yet vital to the continuity of biodiversity and ecological resilience. These “forgotten” areas offer not only an alternative vision of urban nature but also reveal how such spaces are culturally valued or disregarded. Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, meanwhile, frames the stream and its parkland as layered, contradictory sites that mirror the tensions of society. The Meaques becomes a liminal space where the urban and the wild intersect, a place of reflection and retreat that is both embedded in the city and quietly apart from it.

Building on this theoretical foundation, Clara Cernou embarks on an exploration that combines walking, drawing, photography, and mapping to capture the micro-events of everyday life along the stream: rhythms, textures, light and shadow, sound and silence, isolation and community, boundaries and beauty. The result is an affective, multidimensional cartography that merges the physical landscape with the lived experiences and perceptions that shape and animate it.