Issue date: 25 Sep, 2013
The Dragon Bridge crosses the river Guadaíra in the town of Alcalá de Guadaíra (Seville). It was built by the Civil Engineers José Luis Manzanares and Íñigo Barahona and opened on the 28th of March 2007. It is 123 metres long, with four spans: 43 metres the two central ones and 18.5 metres the two end ones. It was one of the first figurative bridges in the world and the first in Spain, and it emulates a dragon emerging from the Castillo hill and swimming across the river. Its inspiration comes from the architecture of Antoni Gaudí in Güell Park in Barcelona. The bridge is made of reinforced, pre-stressed concrete covered in "trencadis", a mosaic composed of pieces of ceramic and traditional tiles. It forms part of the Alcalá de Guadaíra bypass.
The Puente Ingeniero Carlos Fernández Casado -which takes its name from the construction engineer - spans the Barrios de Luna reservoir, in the province of Leon. It was built between 1981 and 1983 as part of the AP-66 or Ruta de la Plata motorway. It is a cable-stayed bridge, measuring 643 metres long and 22 metres wide, for four lanes, and was the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world at that time. It has two towers more than 100 metres high, which open at the bottom. Each tower has 27 pairs of front cables and 28 pairs of rear cables. The bridge is divided into three spans, the central span measuring 440 metres and the two side spans measuring 66 metres. A sliding joint was built into the central span to absorb expansion movements.
Carlos Fernández Casado (Logroño, 1905- Madrid, 1988) was one of the most prestigious and innovative civil engineers in his profession. From the outset, he specialised in resistant bridge structures, researching new materials in his own laboratory. Professor of Bridges, he examined archives and libraries and travelled the roads of Spain to classify bridges, Roman roadways, aqueducts and other civil engineering works to lay the foundations of the history of engineering.
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