Vizcaya Bridge

Overview

The Vizcaya Bridge is an 1893 iron transporter bridge over the Nervión estuary, joining Portugalete on the left bank to Las Arenas (Areeta) in Getxo on the right, downstream from Bilbao. It was the first transporter bridge built anywhere in the world, and it has never been converted into anything else: instead of a road deck, a gondola hangs from the crossbeam and shuttles back and forth, leaving the shipping channel clear underneath.

Everyone here calls it the Puente Colgante, the hanging bridge, which sounds like a mistake because it is not a suspension bridge. The name is accurate about a different thing. The 160 metre crossbeam is neither welded nor riveted to the towers; it hangs from 70 steel cables, resting on corbels that spread its weight down the four iron towers, each of them 61 metres high.

Two entirely different visits happen on the same structure. One is the crossing, which costs less than a coffee, takes ninety seconds, and is simply how a few thousand people a day get to work. The other is the walkway 50 metres up, reached by panoramic lift, where you look down the whole mouth of the Nervión towards the Port of Bilbao and the Abra bay. Do both. The crossing is the point of the bridge; the walkway is the view.

UNESCO inscribed the bridge on 13 July 2006 at the committee session in Vilnius, calling out the way the transporter mechanism fused iron technology with the then new steel cables to create a form of construction that spread worldwide. It was the Basque Country’s first World Heritage site and Spain’s first industrial one.

History

The design began in secret. In 1887 the Basque architect Alberto de Palacio y Elissague and the French engineer Ferdinand Arnodin worked up a draft for a bridge with a moving carriage suited to wide estuaries, and on 5 November that year they filed the patent application simultaneously, Palacio in Bilbao and Arnodin in Paris. Palacio had grown up in the Epalza house in Portugalete, graduated in architecture in Barcelona in 1882, then went to Paris to study engineering, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

He had already worked through the alternatives and thrown all of them out: swing bridges, bascule bridges, lift bridges, cable-stayed bridges, barges, ferries. None of them let a busy river port keep working. The project went in on 20 February 1888, the building licence came on 12 February 1890 after the Ministry for Promotion’s engineers got over their doubts, and construction ran from May 1890 to July 1893.

The bridge is a shopping list of 1890s European industry. Tower profiles were forged at Le Creusot, the replaceable cables were mild steel from the Firminy wireworks, the wiring came from Arnodin’s own workshops at Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, and the deck was rolled by the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya blast furnaces and put together at the Zorroza workshops in Bilbao. A two cylinder vertical steam boiler built by Henri David in Orleans pulled the cables that moved the gondola. It opened on 28 July 1893.

The Spanish Civil War reached the estuary in 1937. The bridge took hits in several bombing raids without fatal damage, but in June, with Franco’s troops closing in, the Northern Army’s Engineers Battalion was ordered to destroy every crossing of the Nervión.

Dredging started within days so ships could still reach the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya works at Sestao, but rebuilding waited two years. Order Nº 3880, issued on 5 August 1939, approved a reconstruction project by the civil engineer Aracil, with Luis Alberto Ribed Nieulant directing the works; rival designs closer to the original were rejected, though their authors joined the final team. Service resumed on 19 June 1941, and that four year gap remains the only long interruption in the bridge’s working life.

Everything a visitor uses today dates from one burst of work at the end of the 1990s. A new concession company took over in 1995, commissioned a full structural report that December, and then spent years replacing rails, reinforcing cables and repainting the whole bridge. The 1998 to 1999 programme delivered the current gondola, new boarding halls, automated ticket machines, and the two things tourists come for: the pedestrian walkway and the panoramic lifts.

Visiting

Start with the gondola, because it is the bridge doing its job. There is nothing to book and no ticket office queue: walk into the boarding hall on either bank, pay at the machine, and get on. Crossings run all day and all night, one every eight minutes, and the trip itself lasts a minute and a half.

Fares are per crossing and depend on the hour. On foot it is 0.60 € between 05:00 and 22:00, rising to 1.70 € between midnight and 05:00. A bicycle with its rider is 1.00 €, a motorbike 1.10 €, a car 1.80 €, a van 2.70 €, and a truck up to 9,000 kg 7.50 €. Late at night on winter weekdays the continuous service stops and a fixed timetable takes over, with departures roughly every half hour from around midnight until about 04:45, alternating between the two banks.

The walkway is the separate, paid visit, and it is the one with hours. Panoramic lifts run from the terraces on both the Portugalete and Getxo sides up to the deck 50 metres above the estuary, and the ticket is a round trip: 11 € for an adult, 14 € with the audio guide, 9 € for over 65s and for anyone with a student card, free under five. The audio guide comes in Basque, Spanish, French and English, and there are explanatory panels along the walkway for anyone who skips it.

Opening hours change twice a year. From Easter to October the walkway is open 10:00 to 20:00; from November to Easter it is 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:00, with that long closed afternoon block catching people out. Last access is 20 minutes before closing in both seasons, and the whole thing is weather dependent. Buy at the shop by the bridge exit or online before you travel.

Accessibility splits neatly along the same line. The gondola is accessible to everyone; the walkway is not currently usable by wheelchair users or with a pushchair, something the operator says it is working on. There is braille signage along the full length of the walkway.

Groups of 15 or more pay 9 € each and the guide or group leader goes free, but you have to arrange it in advance by phone or email rather than turning up. A guided visit runs 30 to 45 minutes.

Getting here is a metro decision rather than a taxi one. Metro Bilbao Line 1, the Plentzia branch, serves Areeta for the Getxo side; Line 2 towards Santurtzi serves Portugalete on the opposite bank. Since the gondola links the two, you can arrive on one line and leave on the other, which is the tidiest way to do this as a half day out from the city.

Tips

• Ride the gondola before you decide about anything else. At 0.60 € on foot, it is about as cheap as a World Heritage site in Spain gets, and if the ninety seconds do nothing for you, you have saved yourself the 11 € walkway ticket.

• Winter visitors: the walkway shuts between 14:00 and 16:00 from November to Easter, and last access is 20 minutes before closing at 19:00. Turning up at 18:45 in January gets you nothing.

• The summer schedule runs to 20:00 from Easter to October, which is the only window that puts you up there for low evening light over the Abra.

• Hours are weather dependent and the operator posts service notices on its homepage. Check the day you travel, not the week before.

• Wheelchair users and anyone with a pushchair should plan on the gondola only. The walkway has no step-free route at present.

• Over 65 or carrying a student card? That is 9 € rather than 11 €, and the same 9 € rate applies to anyone in a group of 15 or more, with the group leader free.

• Arrive on one bank and leave from the other. Areeta is on Metro Line 1 and Portugalete on Line 2, so the gondola crossing doubles as the connection between them.

• Give the Portugalete side an hour on foot. The old town above the boarding hall keeps its medieval arches and streets, the 15th-century Basílica de Santa María and the Salazar tower.

• The Getxo bank reads completely differently. Las Arenas and neighbouring Neguri were laid out in the late 19th century as residential districts for the Basque industrial bourgeoisie, which is why the streets behind the bridge are lined with mansions; the older fishing core, Puerto Zaharra, sits further along in Algorta.

• If you are combining this with the Guggenheim, do the bridge first. It runs late into the night and the museum does not.