The heart of the new Parque de Vallmora near Masnou (Barcelona) is a large equipped promenade that also serves as a grand balcony or mirador over the city. One of the most unique facilities built in the park is an ‘insect hotel’: a place that provides certain vulnerable species, among them solitary bees, with a quiet and safe space in which to hibernate, grow, thrive, and reproduce.

The mission of this small infrastructure is not only to protect and control an animal group in danger of extinction due to agriculture and deforestation, but also, in general, to promote the park’s biodiversity, taking into account that the thriving of bees, butterflies, dragonflies, ants, and other creatures of the kind is beneficial to plants, and therefore good for the entire ecosystem.

The so-called hotel for insects is an artificial construction made of natural materials expressly selected by virtue of their affinity to the particular specimens to be housed in the unique small ‘building.’ For example, while stone seems appropriate for the habitat of spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, glow-worms, and praying mantises, it is ceramic – in the form of blocks of thermoclay – that helps in the breeding of solitary bees, and wood (pine cones and perforated trunks) is suitable for the larvae of bees, beetles, and centipedes. A whole universe hosted in a small monolith...[+]