The approach to restoring the Roman bridge at Cordoba must have always been a concern for technicians, aware of the importance of the project and the site.

In the 1st century, the Romans built a large bridge over the Guadalquivir River, with seventeen arches and a length of some three hundred metres, to connect to the Via Augusta, which connected Rome with Cadiz. The place was so strategic and the bridge so necessary that it continued to be used for practically one thousand nine hundred years; few bridges have been used for so long. Also, the Guadalquivir River reaches Cordoba fed by a series of torrential tributaries that, every few years, created major floods that caused a great deal of damage to towns, crops and the few bridged built over it.

The Cordoba bridge survived thanks to successive reconstruction projects over time, and there must have been many such projects, as only two of its current sixteen arches keep the original Romans materials. This bridge can be said to function symbolically as the great Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir, when it is actually a mosaic of restorations…through all of which the bridge has retained its unity and consistency.

Another feature of this bridge is that it is both a road and an urban bridge; it was originally part of the Via Augusta, and of the Madrid-Cadiz road until May 2004, when it was closed to traffic and became pedestrian. Furthermore, both the Cordoba Mosque and the Royal Fortress were built just a few metres away and the city centre was also fairly close even in Roman times.

The text reproduced here contains information about the Roman bridge at Cordoba and its repairs from the 14th century on, which an engineer managed to compile in the city archives. He must have worked on it from 1876 to 1894, when they were published by Revista de Obras Públicas in its Anales. Both in the prologue and in the historic report, we can find information about how the person then in charge of the bridge’s conservation lived, an occasion when it was flooded by the river and how, based on pure historic or professional interest, Luis Sainz carefully examined the intrados of the arches from a boat, in a search for stonemasonry marks, which he then identified with other found on city walls or churches, establishing hypotheses that helped him to discover information about all the bridge’s successive repairs.

In December 1876, Luis Sainz Gutiérrez, recently appointed inspector general of public works, was forced to face the consequences of the Guadalquivir rising on the Roman bridge. He graphically describes his impressions as the flooding occurred, with the waters carrying a load of trees that “once and again collided against the downstream wall, powerfully impelled by the swirls formed by the current, producing movements that the bridge transmitted to my body that night, making me fear for its safety”.

The bridge withstood the flooding, as on earlier occasions, and none of the arches was seriously damaged, but Luis Sainz decided that the elevation needed repairing, together with the completion of a masonry repair that was in progress when the river flooded its banks.

With the responsibility of intervening such an ancient and symbolic construction, and amazed by its heterogeneous tackles and arches, the engineer was afraid of destroying something that should be preserved, so he decided to personally seek information in the Cordoba city archives. He found information from different eras that enabled him to draft these notes which, although not a complete historic interpretation of the bridge (pending still today), enabled him to become very familiar with it and make a more informed decision on what to repair and how to repair it.