The conference center sits on the boundary between the town and the country, on the outskirts of Plasencia, the edge between what has been touched by a less artificial humanity and what has been touched only by millennia of climate. What has been touched by humanity has covered up the millennia of climate with the sweep of a trowel in just a few years. This is strange, even economically, because to do so, 15-m-high retaining walls had to be built.