Fumanya Dinosaur Park

Book

Located in an old opencast coal mine in Alt Berguedà, the Fumanya dinosaur footprint site is the most important in Europe and one of the most valuable worldwide. The remains found include more than 3,500 dinosaur footprints, egg and bone fossils, a dinosaur skin fossil - unique in Europe - as well as a great wealth of remains of the ecosystem where the dinosaurs lived, with fossils of large leaves and trunks of primeval palm trees 65 million years old.

Based on this extraordinary heritage, as well as a powerful global dynomania that is shown in the resounding and sustained success of dinosaur exhibitions and shows, the creation of the Fumanya Dinosaur Park is proposed, with the aim of becoming the reference center on dinosaurs in Catalonia, at the same time as a territorial rebalancing project for Berguedà, a region severely affected by the disappearance of coal mining and the textile industry.

The paleontological, natural, geological and landscape values of the site will be interpreted along the Cretaceous Route, an outdoor itinerary that will bring visitors closer to the dinosaur footprints and which will complement the current Interpretation Centre. The expansion of the current reception and shop pavilion will form a larger Visitor Centre. The recreation of the world of the dinosaurs - the Cretaceous World - will be located in the mountain of rubble near the site, mostly buried within it.

The Cretaceous World, built on top and within the huge earth mound formed by dumping the soil escavated in the mine, will recreate in a spectacular and at the same time scientific way, not only the dinosaurs, but also the ecosystem in which they lived. Thus, a crater excavated in the mountain of rubble and covered by a dome-greenhouse will contain real-scale and moving replicas of the dinosaurs of Fumanya, surrounded by a veritable botanical garden of the Cretaceous, with palm trees, cycads, conifers, tree ferns, gingkos and orchids among others, all of them current plants direct descendants of those of the Cretaceous.

Editor and publisher
© Eduard Balcells Architecture+Urbanism+Landscape. Eduard Balcells Montané, Architect

Year
2019

Project
Fumanya Dinosaur Park

View the book here in Catalan

Parc Dinosaures Fumanya