"Situation
It is located between the Puente de Triana and the Puente de los Remedios . It crosses the river from the Paseo de las Delicias until it reaches the other shore, in the Plaza de Cuba, extending along the Avenida de la República Argentina , thus linking the city center with the Los Remedios neighborhood.
Background and construction
The first bridge in the city was the Puente de Barcas , which was replaced in 1852 by the current Puente de Triana , officially called Puente de Isabel II. On March 15, 1880, a railway bridge called Alfonso XII was inaugurated . In order to solve the water problem, in 1882 the Seville City Council granted a 99-year concession to the English company The Seville Water Works Company Limited to supply water to the people of Seville. Among the infrastructures created by this company was an aqueduct over the Guadalquivir at the height of the Plaza de Chapina that was inaugurated on April 23, 1898. This structure also allowed pedestrian passage and was known as Pasadera orWater Walkway .
In 1857 Seville had 112,529 registered inhabitants and in 1910 it reached 158,287 inhabitants. Of those neighbors, 30,000 lived on the western bank of the river, where the Triana neighborhood was, and the city only had three bridges. In 1917 the engineer Antonio Ibarra Miró, from the Provincial Headquarters of Public Works in Seville, carried out a study to choose its location. The decision was made to do it in front of the Salón Cristina building, near the San Telmo Palace , because many constructions from the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition would be located south of the center and it was thought that the opposite bank could be urbanized in the future. In this study, a road was also proposed that would run along the current República Argentina avenue and that it would extend to the neighborhood of La Pañoleta, in Camas . That highway would be the basis of a route to Coria del Río , Huelva and Extremadura .
The Seville Public Works Headquarters announced a public tender to which the French company Schneider y Cía participated, with a bridge with metal sections that would cost 11 million pesetas, and the Spanish company Compañía de Construcciones Hidráulicas y Civiles, with a bridge that It cost 8 million. The latter was directed by the engineer José Eugenio Ribera . The General Directorate of Public Works chose the Ribera project. The General Directorate reduced the width of the bridge from 20 to 15 meters and eliminated many ornaments that, if placed, should have been paid for by the City Council. The budget for the bridge, after this, became 5,821,318 pesetas.
The structural arrangement of the lateral arches had been employed by the French engineer Paul Séjourné in his ashlar masonry arches from Luxembourg and Toulouse . This type of arches on the bridge had already been used by Ribera in 1909 on the Queen Victoria Bridge over the Manzanares River in Madrid . The advantages of this type of arch led to it being considered a standard arch for reinforced concrete highway arch bridges in 1924.
The drawbridge central section was designed and assembled by the Barcelona company La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima . The bridge would be a drawbridge to favor the access of ships to the Arenal docks .
Before its construction, Alfonso XIII said he was worried that the bridge would obscure the view of the Torre del Oro from the south of the city. After this comment the level of the bridge was lowered three meters. This was possible because the Ministry of Public Works was carrying out at that time the felling of the Vega de Triana in the Guadalquivir, and this implied that the branch of the river that passed through Seville would remain as a dock not subject to the flooding of the river.
Ribera had designed the bridge in 1920, at a time more prone to "modernist fantasies", when he was collaborating with the architects Gustavo and Roberto Fernández Balbuena. However, when the works were to begin, these same architects considered that this design was out of fashion and the bridge was executed with much simpler lines. In 1920, the aim was to disguise the fact that it was a concrete bridge, but when the bridge was inaugurated in 1931, Ribera himself said:
The beauty of a bridge can be obtained by the silhouette of its forms and by the proportions of its elements. Its concrete walls must not be hidden [...] We are in an era of constructive sincerity.
For the construction Ribera had the help of the engineers Eduardo Torroja , José Entrecanales and Manuel Távora Barrera . The latter had demonstrated his expertise in reinforced concrete works with the loading platform for the Cala mines made for the Port of Seville in San Juan de Aznalfarache.
The bridge
On August 13, 1931 , after carrying out a load test, it was opened to pedestrian traffic.
For the operation of the drawbridge, there had to be a permanent staff in charge of the maneuvers of the bridge and the maintenance of the machinery. The annual budget of the bridge for its maintenance in 1958 was 370,000 pesetas. The pavement in the lift zone was made of wood and its upper part had to be renewed every 5 or 6 years. The last substitution took place in 1963. It cost 1,100,000 pesetas and was carried out by Juan Bocanegra Castro. The idea of ??converting the bridge into a fixed one was already raised in 1959. 11In October 1959 port officials and state highway officials reached an agreement that the bridge would be permanently lowered. However, in May 1960 the Ministry forced it to be drawbridge from 2 to 6 in the morning. In November 1961, the State ordered the night lift to cease because it was necessary to repair the mechanism. After six months of repairs it was found that there were very few boats going up the river beyond that point, with the exception of boats loaded with ice and fish.
In 1962, the Seville Works Headquarters asked the Madrid Bridge Headquarters for a project to replace the mobile section of the bridge with a fixed one, and to provide the bridge with a new 18-meter platform (a carriageway with 4 lanes and 14 meters with two 2 meter sidewalks). The project was carried out by the engineer José Antonio Puyal Lezcano. In November 1963 the work was awarded to the Agromán company. The direction of the works was entrusted to the author of the project, who collaborated with Francisco Guerrero Martín Romero. In addition, the Agromán company put Rafael Romero Martínez in charge of the works. The works began in February 1964. The load, static and dynamic tests of the finished work took place on March 26, 1965. It was opened to the public days after these tests. In the 1960s the bridge was part of the SE-600 highway, which connected Seville with San Juan de Aznalfarache. In 1984 this road, and the bridge, passed into the hands of the Junta de Andalucía . The Ministry of Public Works and Transport renewed the railings and lampposts in 1992, before the Universal Exhibition of that year.
On April 27, 1994, the Junta de Andalucía transferred ownership of the bridge to the Seville City Council.
In 2006, a rehabilitation of the bridge was carried out, with a budget of 1.5 million euros. These works would end at the end of 2007.
Currently the bridge has four lanes, two in each direction, as well as a sidewalk on each side, with one of them having a bicycle lane."
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