shakira builds her own town in madrid with BIG-designed park

SHAKIRA BUILDS HER OWN MACONDO IN MADRID

Why settle for a stadium when you can build a town? For her Madrid residency, Shakira has taken over the 185,000-square-meter Iberdrola Music venue in Villaverde, transforming it into Macondo Park, a temporary cultural landscape designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Conceived as an alternative to the conventional concert arena, the site combines a stadium for more than 50,000 spectators with colorful pavilions, markets, food, art, fashion, cinema, and children’s spaces — an entire world constructed around the shows rather than merely behind the stage.

Unlike an existing stadium, where attention converges on a single performance, the purpose-built environment allowed the architects to choreograph the audience’s full journey. ‘The architecture is designed to not only accommodate large crowds, but also to guide people, create moments of discovery, and offer places to gather, celebrate, and find shade throughout the day,’ Stefani Fachini de Araujo, Associate at BIG and Design Lead on the project, tells designboom. Shakira may remain the main attraction, but the celebration is deliberately set in motion well before she appears.

colorful paths unfold across the temporary venue | all images courtesy of BIG

COLOR-CODED PATHS LEAD THROUGH A TEMPORARY TOWN

Visitors enter through a sequence of Es Latina welcoming arches, each assigned its own color and connected to a matching route across the site. The paths lead toward 12 temporary pavilions and complementary fan, VIP, and children’s areas, with eight of the main structures dedicated to pillars of Latin American culture. ‘Each path leads visitors to a different pavilion containing a unique experience,’ explains Fachini de Araujo from BIG. At the center stands the Macondo Tree, a shared landmark that gives this otherwise vast event ground something resembling a town square.

More than 500 trees and planted islands draw from Mediterranean, Spanish, and Latin American landscapes, reducing the scale of the open venue and adding pockets of shade. ‘Along the way, more than 500 trees bring human scale to the site, turning a vast event ground into a park,’ the Design Lead continues. The fictional town of Macondo, borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, becomes less a literal reconstruction than a spatial framework for mixing storytelling, popular culture, and collective celebration — with a little stadium logistics tucked underneath.

BIG designs macondo park for shakira’s madrid residency

BIG DESIGNS EVERY ELEMENT FOR A SECOND LIFE

Building this temporary universe meant working against both scale and time. According to Fachini de Araujo, the design process took around six months, while some of the pavilions were assembled in roughly ten days. ‘This led us to work with the components found at any large event, such as trusses, scaffolding, containers, and stage ground support systems, and to rethink how they come together,’ she shares. Wrapped in brightly colored fabric, the familiar event infrastructure becomes a family of shaded structures, each with a distinct identity but a deliberately pragmatic skeleton.

The temporary nature of Macondo Park also informed what happens after the final concert. ‘Knowing from the start that it would be dismantled, we chose every element with its next life in mind,’ Fachini de Araujo tells designboom. The structures and fabrics are intended for reuse, the artificial grass can be relocated to schools and playgrounds, and the trees will return to the nursery. For a project designed around spectacle, its disappearing act has been considered surprisingly carefully.

colorful paths unfold across the temporary venue