Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre: The Mermaid on the Bridge
Why is it significant?
Walk down the ramp beneath the bridge and stand among the sculptures: bronze, steel, stone and concrete shapes scattered across a sunken plaza, with the traffic of the Castellana roaring past on either side. Then look straight up.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre: The Mermaid on the Bridge |
|---|---|
| Address | Paseo de la Castellana, 28046 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.43300, -3.68740 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk down the ramp beneath the bridge and stand among the sculptures: bronze, steel, stone and concrete shapes scattered across a sunken plaza, with the traffic of the Castellana roaring past on either side. Then look straight up. Hanging from the underside of the bridge, held by steel cables, is a huge block of concrete.
This is the Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre, the Open-Air Sculpture Museum. When the bridge linking Calle de Juan Bravo and Calle de Eduardo Dato was built around 1970, its engineers, José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez and Julio Martínez Calzón, decided that the dead space beneath it should become a gallery. The artist Eusebio Sempere designed the railing above, and some of the best Spanish sculptors of the century donated works.
Look around you: there is a bronze by Joan Miró, pieces by Julio González and Pablo Serrano, a work by Alberto Sánchez, the sculptor of rural Castile. All of it abstract, all of it free, open day and night. In the early 1970s, while Spain was still a dictatorship, this was a quietly radical gesture: modern art in the street, for everyone.
And then there is the mermaid. Eduardo Chillida's La sirena varada, the Stranded Mermaid, weighs around six tonnes, and it was designed to hang exactly where you see it now. In 1972 the city authorities refused. What if the cables failed and six tonnes of concrete landed on the traffic? The engineers protested that the bridge was built for it. The argument dragged on for years, and the sculpture spent them on the ground, far from its intended home.
Finally, in 1978, the mermaid was lifted into the air, and she has floated over the Castellana ever since. Nothing has fallen. Climb back up to street level and follow Calle de Serrano north to Calle de María de Molina, to the home of a man who collected art the way others collect stamps.