The hardest time of the year comes, giving our loved ones (and smallest) to the care of other people. Let’s at least make sure they’re in good buildings.

The hardest moment of the year comes, when we return from our well-deserved vacations and we have to face two great inconveniences: the return to work and the “delivery” of our most tender infants to the daycare centers on duty. But experience tells us that we must not only be demanding with the qualification of the employees of the children’s educational center, we also want them to be inside good buildings, as modern and prepared as possible.

So we have prepared a selection of the latest and most modern nurseries that have opened in Spain. We will start with Zaragoza, where the Magen Arquitectos studio won the competition held in 2011 for the design and construction of a nursery school. It is the Vasderpartera Children’s School, with a budget of almost 2.5 million euros and an area of ​​1,809 square meters in which they built a wonderful elliptical-shaped building with a variety of colors, opened in 2016.

The action stems from the need for the growth of the southern limit of the city, with 10,000 homes. The building responds to the model of the Italian municipal schools of Reggio Emilia, where the school is linked to a free interior space or central square. The curved shapes, without corners, reinforce the playful character of children’s learning (according to the architects). Open spaces, light and a variety of colors play an important role in this magnificent building.

We moved 180 kilometers north to Pamplona, ​​where the Pereda Pérez architecture studio designed the La Milagrosa nursery school. Its execution ended in 2016 and its geometric layout is triangular, nothing to do with the previous one (for that of the variety), responding to the ground on which it was built, with residential buildings in two party walls and a plaza in front, to which It has an exit.

The building is an example of space utilization and architectural adaptation, a plot immersed in a residential infrastructure. Thus, the rooms were positioned according to the best use of them: administrative offices inside, educational modules outside and at the ends of the triangle the outer courtyards. The dimensions of the place, 1,630 square meters, allow a great use of light, reaffirmed by the inclusion of skylights for areas with difficult access to light.

We now cross the Iberian peninsula about 600 kilometers, to Alicante, where the suggestive architecture studio Esculpir el Aire has delighted us with the transformation of a building by the architect José Ángel Ruiz Cárdenes. The Infant Education Center Nuestra Escuela (for children under 3 years) is the beneficiary of this action, in which the building has been provided with a new, more lively and striking envelope.

A well-defined color palette articulates the spaces, with a variety of attractive elements, such as native vegetation, a waterfall and night lighting worth seeing. The best: the geometry of the garden is developed indirectly by the children, who were asked to draw freely, the result of the study of those parameters established by the infants is this building, configured with tiles from the company Cerámicas Vilar Albaro, with 10 x 20 and 20 x 20 cm formats, capable of adapting to the undulating walls.

300 kilometers to the South, we will visit another wonderful building destined to safeguard our little jewels, in Almería is the municipal nursery school of Vélez-Rubio, completed in 2010, and designed by the architecture studio Los del Desierto. The property’s roof folds to double the height on the ground, allowing more natural light to enter. The building contains 8 classrooms, multipurpose dining-room, kitchen and administrative area, all distributed around a central courtyard, covering a total area of ​​874 square meters.

The fun for the little ones is guaranteed by the cheerful circular windows of different dimensions that drill into the property, whose crystals, of different colors, flood the interior with magenta, yellow and blue. A 1.30 meter plinth divides the adult area from the children’s one, from there downwards, acoustic vinyls covering the wall and floor, in different colors depending on the classroom: 0-1 year old blue, mix of red and yellow for 1-2 years and green for children between 2 and 3 years. The best: under the pavement a radiant floor installation circulates, so that the creatures do not get cold.

We finish (for now) this trip for children in Madrid, 550 kilometers away, in the new center of the English for fun language school, designed by the architects Lorena del Río and Iñaqui Carnicero del Rica Estudio, in total a surface of 1,050 square meters, ending the execution of the project in 2016. In this school, founded in 2011, children learn English using their five senses, so you can imagine the importance of the environment…

The designers ignored the classic dividing structures (walls) to create partition spaces capable of interacting with infants, where they could store the elements of the class, but that would serve as a habitable wall in which children could use their imagination. In addition, these thick walls connect the spaces, allowing a showcase of the learning process, since there are no visual divisions … Fantastic! Would you be able to decide which nursery school you would take your child to?