An ambitious project to expand one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world imported over 700,000 thousand tons of sand from the ocean bed north of Sicily to increase the buildable area of Monaco. Now called Mareterra, a nod to the French words for ‘sea’ and ‘land’, the project has reached the final stages of completion, with Prince Albert and his family on hand for the official inauguration earlier this month. Mareterra has been a $2.4 billion endeavor to increase the land size of Monaco by about 3%. This adds six hectares of space to Monaco’s existing 208 hectares (a space only about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park), which brings the amount of land Monaco has added over the past sixty years to roughly 25% of the principality’s total size. There are just over 100 new residences, of which only about dozen are single-family homes and the rest condominiums.
Mareterra was announced in 2013, but the initial dredging didn’t begin until after a few more years of planning in 2017. At the beginning over 10,000 caissons were installed in the Mediterranean so the seawater could be drained and the tons of imported sand could be deposited as the foundational layer. The main residential structure is a block of luxury apartments, named Le Renzo in honor of architect Renzo Piano who designed this building as well as other parts of the project. Other notable names from the architecture echelons were architects Norman Foster, Tadao Ando and Valode & Pistre Architectes, while landscape architect Michel Desvigne developed the overall plan. The master plan accommodates for a one meter rise in sea level over the next hundred years, which led to the building-on-stilts design of the main residential building.
The environmental focus was key to the project, with other features including over an acre of solar panels (in keeping with the goal of making Monaco carbon neutral by 2050), a rainwater recycling system and over 200 electric car charging points. The project relocated many square meters of a protected underwater fauna, addressed the issues of an invasive algae and built artificial reefs to encourage colonization of the new coast. Over 1,000 trees were grown at a nursery in Italy to be used throughout the six hectare landscape.
An installation by renowned sculptor Alexander Calder has returned to Monaco. Pictured below, the piece Quatre Lances, originally purchased by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in 1966, now has a prominent in one of the central courtyards.
Prices for residences have not been disclosed. But with Monaco having some of the highest priced real estate in the world, a local paper reports units have been selling for as much as $126,000 per square meter (or $42,000 per square foot).
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