Issue date: 09 Sep, 2009
The Architecture series is made up of six stamps devoted to the Puente de Los Tilos in the island of La Palma, the Canal de Castilla and some other four ones making up the souvenir sheet depicting the four towers of a new business centre near the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, amongst which the two known as Cristal and Espacio.
The Puente de los Tilos, is a bridge built by engineers Santiago Pérez-Fadón Martinez and José Emilio Herrero Beneítez and their team near San Andrés y Sauces in the island of La Palma (Canary Islands). It was inaugurated on the 18th December 2004 and it consists of a 255m span arch. The arch and spandrel piers are made of high resistance concrete. The length of the bridge is 357 m and stands more than 150m high over the del Agua gully. With this bridge, the authors broke the span record in the building of concrete arches in Spain.
The Canal de Castilla is one of the most important civil engineering constructions in Spain. It was built as a means of communication for the region of Tierra de Campos so that agricultural produce could be transported along the canal to the northern sea ports. It was finished by 1849 and has an inverted Y shape with a total length of 270 km running through the provinces of Palencia, Burgos and Valladolid. With the arrival of the train, the canal lost its purpose as a means of communication and became an irrigation channel in 1909. Since 1972 the Hydrographic Confederation of the Duero River is in charge of its management and maintenance.
The four towers standing out in the skyline of Madrid are built over the grounds of the old centre of the Ciudad Deportiva Real Madrid (Real Madrid Sports City) which is now a business park. There are buildings such as the one designed by Norman Foster resembling a shelf and measuring 250m, the highest building in Spain. The Torre de Cristal is 249 m high and is the work of Argentinean architect César Pelli; the third one is a triangular tower 236m high covered in glass and designed by Carlos Rubio Carvajal and Enrique Alvarez-Sala Walter; lastly, Torre Espacio measures 223m, is quadrangular shaped and is the work of the Mew York studio of Pei, Cobb Freed & Partners.
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