Historical drama: a new museum for Cartagena's amphitheatre reinvigorates the Spanish city's heritage.

Built in the era of emperor Augustus two millennia ago, Cartagena's theatre was a minor wonder of the ancient world and a major feat of Roman engineering and construction. An entire hillside was excavated to form the bowl of an amphitheatre capable of seating 6,000 people, its graceful tiers inscribing a perfect semicircle on the steep terrain. An ornate proscenium was equipped for the presentation of elaborate theatrical spectacles (evidence shows that Roman audiences enjoyed drama, mime and pantomime). To the rear of the stage was a huge double porticoed gallery surrounding a central garden, where patrons strolled, chatted and took refreshment during interludes. Poised on the Cerro de la Concepcion, the hill overlooking the harbour, the theatre dominated Cartagena's ancient townscape and would have been a familiar landmark to those arriving by sea. The drama of its setting, together with the quality of materials and richness of ornament, served to emphasise its significance as a major public and civic monument of the Augustinian age.

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So it is perhaps all the more surprising that this great Roman masterpiece lay undiscovered for centuries, entombed by successive layers of Cartagena's history. The site lies in one of the few parts of the city that has been continuously occupied since Roman times, resulting in a complex geological strata of Byzantine, Moorish, medieval and modern remains. Eras collide, meld and overlap, often surreally. For instance, the 13th-century cathedral of Santa Maria la Vieja, one of Spain's oldest churches, intrudes on to the south-west edge of the amphitheatre, its picturesque ruins resembling a crumbling stage set. Tentative archaeological investigations in the 19th century yielded odd fragments of Roman pottery, but gave little clue as to the historical and physical enormity of what lay beneath. It was not until the late 1980s that a more concerted programme of excavation finally revealed the astonishing nature of the site.

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What began as a simple archaeological initiative has effectively become the driving force behind a wider and more ambitious plan to regenerate a hitherto depressed part of the city. Architectural and urban design input was coordinated by Rafael Moneo and involved the construction of a new museum and the implementation of a new infrastructure that meshes the historic site sensitively into its surroundings. The aim is to preserve, celebrate and make sense of Cartagena's fertile and enduring history.

In response to the dense, fragmented nature of the site, the museological functions are divided and housed in two very different buildings. Anchored to the slopes of the Cerro de la Concepcion and linked by an underground corridor, these two elements form an armature for a vertical promenade that transports visitors up from the waterfront to the theatre, preparing them for the climatic moment when they finally emerge into the theatre itself.

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The lowermost building is a remodelling and extension of the 19th-century Riquelme Palace, now in a rather delicious flesh-coloured render. This is the scene of back-of-house functions, such as offices, study rooms, a library and cafe. Moneo's taut, elegant new part docks into the old palace to create an impluvium style courtyard. A subterranean 'archaeological corridor' charting the neighbourhood since Roman times sets the scene and links the palace with the museum's second phase.

The compression of the long, low tunnel gives way to a pair of exhibition spaces cut into the flanks of the Cerro de la Concepcion. Conceived as tall, luminous cabinets, these are stacked vertically and connected by escalators that provide a vertiginous trajectory up the side of the hill. Light percolates indirectly (to mitigate the Mediterranean glare) through cuts in the roof and floors, bouncing off walls of either white painted concrete or honey-coloured stone, infusing the lofty spaces with a pearly radiance. From the street, this new part reads as a kind of hermetic, minimally perforated box, yet its understated facade of textured stone blocks gathers to a focus with the presence of a solitary sculpture, a headless torso in pale marble, mounted on an external platform.

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In some ways, this is emblematic of the building's function as a neutral backdrop for the precious relics of a very distant past. The exhibition spaces are devoted to elements salvaged from the theatre: exquisitely carved cornices, sculptures and florid Corinthian capitals in creamy Carrera marble, together with remnants of the pink sandstone columns that originally formed part of the proscenium. The upper and loftier exhibition space is dominated by a trio of altars representing the traditional deities of the Roman state, indicating that the theatre also had an important political and religious function.

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From these tall luminous spaces, Moneo orchestrates another sense of compression, as visitors progress through a series of tunnels under the ruins of the Santa Maria la Vieja. Executed in long, thin 'Roman' bricks, the passageways burrow through the foundations of the church, revealing the archaeological remains of various eras, peeled away like onion layers. This promenade culminates in the jaw-dropping spectacle of the theatre. The tiers of seating and radial steps are preserved and a section of the proscenium has been reconstructed to give a sense of the scale and form of the Roman original. A new curved wall encloses the upper rim of the bowl, protecting and defining the edge of the monument where it meets an urban park. From the highest tier of seating, visitors can survey Cartagena's backstreets, harbour and the hills that cradle the city. Here nature, artifice and history conjoin brilliantly, prompting the speculation that this view would have been familiar to citizens two millennia ago.

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Moneo's museum complex emerges as a refreshing exercise in sobriety and restraint. It's like a palette-cleansing sorbet: deceptively simple yet tangibly effective. Though identifiably of its time, it does not attempt to compete with or overwhelm an already heady history. Rather, it adds to this rich continuum and gracefully defers to theatre, the real star of the show, whose unknown architect could never have envisaged that, 2,000 years on, his long lost masterpiece would be so memorably brought back to life.

MUSEUM, CARTAGENA, SPAIN

ARCHITECT

RAFAEL MONEO

Photographs

Duccio Malagamba