Castelo Conta

Castelo Conta is a cultural heritage project based in Galicia, Spain, focused on collecting and preserving the oral memory of rural communities — stories, traditions, songs, and testimonies from older generations that exist only in living memory and risk being lost. The ‘Mulleres que Contan’ (Women Who Tell Stories) initiative specifically documents the voices and narratives of women from rural Galicia.

The project needed a mobile application that would serve two distinct functions: a tool for field researchers to record testimonies in the field, and a public-facing app for audiences to explore the collected archive.

What Was Built

The application was built with Flutter, delivering a single codebase targeting both iOS and Android. The field recording module allows researchers to capture audio recordings directly in the app, tag them with location data, speaker information, and thematic categories, and sync them to the central archive when connectivity allows. Offline-first behaviour was important: fieldwork often happens in rural areas with unreliable connectivity, so recordings and their metadata are stored locally until sync is possible.

The public archive module presents the collected stories as a browsable library: filterable by region, theme, and speaker, with playback of audio recordings alongside text transcriptions and contextual notes. The interface was designed to be accessible to an older audience — the people most likely to engage with this kind of cultural content — which meant larger typography, simpler navigation patterns, and high contrast.

Why Flutter

The project had a limited budget, which made a single codebase targeting both platforms the correct choice. Flutter’s Dart layer compiles to native ARM code on both iOS and Android, giving performance close to native without the cost of two separate development efforts. The widget library gave enough control over the visual design to match the cultural aesthetics of the project — warm, traditional, carefully typeset — without fighting the framework.

Cultural Tech Context

This is a different kind of software project from a commercial product. The success metric isn’t revenue or DAUs — it’s whether the oral traditions of Galician rural communities are more accessible and more preserved than they were before. Building software for cultural institutions requires understanding that the technology is in service of something larger than the application itself.