Located on the Mediterranean coast almost 300 miles southeast of Madrid, the port city of Cartagena is rich in a history that dates back more than 2,000 years, when it was a stronghold of ancient Carthage. More recently, the five hills of that Carthaginian settlement, a subsequent Roman colony and Byzantine outpost, are largely bare—the decaying streets between them housing the city’s poorest residents. In 1988, while carrying out a routine archaeological probe for a construction site on the most prominent of these hills, archaeologists stumbled upon the remains of a sumptuous Roman theater that, inscriptions revealed, had been built on orders of the Roman Emperor Augustus near the end of the first century B.C. Eleven years later, in 1999, after securing adequate funds, local officials enlisted architect Rafael Moneo’s collaboration not only to restore the site but to make it the centerpiece of efforts to renew the city and attract tourism.

Rather than simply building a museum and visitors’ center for the theater’s excavations, Moneo has undertaken a project of civic and historic suture. By organizing his intervention as an urban sequence through two museum buildings, a series of tunnels, and a wall of escalators, visitors are transported from the central City Hall Plaza near the waterfront to the hillside ruins 56 feet above. In Moneo’s own words, “The museum … has been designed as a ‘promenade’ from sea level to the higher ground of the city, climaxing with the unexpected appearance of the theater’s imposing space.”