Puente de Segovia: Too Big a Bridge for Too Small a River
Why is it significant?
Walk out onto the Puente de Segovia and lean over the granite parapet: nine sturdy arches stepping across the water, built for a river that, for most of Madrid's history, was the butt of a national joke.
Key Facts
| Place | Puente de Segovia: Too Big a Bridge for Too Small a River |
|---|---|
| Address | Puente de Segovia, Calle de Segovia, 28005 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.41400, -3.72290 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid Río: Royal Bridges, a Buried Motorway and the Slaughterhouse Turned Arts Factory |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk out onto the Puente de Segovia and lean over the granite parapet: nine sturdy arches stepping across the water, built for a river that, for most of Madrid's history, was the butt of a national joke.
Philip II ordered this bridge, and it was designed by Juan de Herrera, the stern genius behind the monastery of El Escorial. It was finished in 1584, which makes it the oldest bridge still standing in Madrid. Philip II had moved his court to Madrid in 1561, and the new capital needed a worthy entrance from the west: this bridge carried the road towards Segovia and the mountains.
The trouble was the river. The Manzanares is a modest stream that in a dry summer could almost be crossed without wetting your ankles, and the poets of Spain's Golden Age could not resist. Góngora wrote mocking verses about it, and a quip repeated for centuries advises Madrid to either sell the bridge or buy itself a river. Madrileños, to their credit, have been repeating the joke against themselves ever since.
In the twentieth century the joke turned sour. The river was locked between stone walls and held back by weirs, and from the 1970s the M-30 ring road ran right along both banks. The old bridge stood stranded between lanes of traffic, and the river behind it became somewhere Madrileños drove past and never looked at.
Then, in the mid-2000s, the city did something extraordinary. Under Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, the motorway along this stretch was buried in tunnels, and on their roofs a new park was laid out, opened in stages and completed in 2011: Madrid Río, more than a hundred hectares of green along about six kilometres of river. Herrera's bridge was given back to the river it was built for. Cross to the far bank, the west side, and turn left to follow the long ribbon of pine trees heading south.