Capitales de Provincia – Photography by Markel Redondo
Capitales de Provincia is a photographic essay commissioned by El País Semanal and shot by Spanish photographer Markel Redondo across the fifty provincial capitals of Spain. This gallery presents a selection of images from the assignment, moving city by city through the country’s often-overlooked administrative centers, the places where most Spaniards actually live, work, and grow old, far from the postcard idea of Spain.
Every Spanish province has a capital, and each carries its own layered identity: a historic core shaped by centuries of trade, faith, and power, wrapped in decades of more recent growth, new developments, ring roads, and the everyday texture of contemporary life. For this commission, Redondo looked at both layers at once, treating the provincial capital as a single, continuous subject rather than splitting the postcard center from its unglamorous edges.
To do this, Redondo combined several ways of seeing the same city. Aerial photography opens up the urban fabric from above, revealing how new neighborhoods spread across the land, how parking lots, housing blocks, and infrastructure organize the periphery. Street photography stays at ground level, following the ordinary choreography of a public square, a market, a bridge crowded with people going about their day. And a body of analog portraits, shot on medium format film, brings the viewer face to face with the people who give each city its particular character: a chef, a cyclist, a shopkeeper, a couple on a bench, a grandmother crossing a plaza.
Shot across cities including Cádiz, Girona, Guadalajara, Murcia, and Vitoria, with more added as the series is published, the work captures a striking diversity of landscapes and ways of life within a single national framework: the Atlantic light of Cádiz’s old town facing the sea, the medieval density of Girona’s river houses, the quiet plains around Guadalajara’s new suburbs, the palm-lined banks of Murcia’s Segura, the arcaded squares of Vitoria’s historic quarter. Together they sketch a portrait of a country that is far more varied, and far more ordinary, than its main tourist circuits suggest.
As in his other editorial work, Redondo favors a documentary approach over staged composition, working with available light and unscripted moments so that each frame stays close to what was actually there. The mix of formats, aerial, digital street work, and film portraiture, is intentional: together they build a fuller sense of place than any single approach could offer on its own.
This gallery includes selected photographs from the assignment, presented city by city, as the series continues to grow. Each new capital added deepens the same underlying question the commission set out to explore: what does an ordinary Spanish city actually look like, once you set aside the postcard and look at the whole of it, from the air, from the street, and from the people who live there.
Markel Redondo is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and drone operator based in the French Basque Country, represented by Panos Pictures London. His work has been featured in The New York Times, El País Semanal, Le Monde, Télérama, Time, and Der Spiegel, among others, and has built a fifteen-year practice centered on territory, urban transformation, and landscape.
For editorial use, exhibition, or licensing inquiries regarding the Capitales de Provincia series, please get in touch via the contact page or visit www.markelredondo.com.
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