Puente de La Salve (La Salve Bridge), Bilbao

The La Salve bridge (La Salve Bridge), previously called the Príncipes de España bridge until its change in 2016, is a bridge over the Bilbao estuary, in Bilbao.

It receives the name of the Salve Bridge because when the ships arrived at the port of Bilbao by the estuary, at the height of the bridge it is the first place where the Virgin of Begoña is seen and there the sailors sang the Salve to her.

Its opening took place on January 9, 1972 and its author was the engineer Juan Batanero García-Geraldo. It was devised at the end of the sixties, to solve the traffic problem, which was beginning to become saturated in the north of the city. It was also the first in Spain with a brace system and one of the few with a metal top. It has 23.5 meters of free height for the passage of boats, being fixed.

It is equipped with lifts from its base on the right bank, in the area of La Salve, at the end of Campo de Volantin. These are maintained by the city council, transporting 200,000 passengers annually. They are free since May 2008.

Next to this bridge, on the left bank of the estuary, is the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum . It is also curious to contemplate how the architect of this museum wanted to integrate, in a certain way, this bridge into it, building, for this purpose and on its left side, as seen from the Campo de Volantín, a tall tower with access stairs to the museum, which is on the right side.

At the end of 2006, the project to build a red portico devised by the French artist Daniel Buren was confirmed , who ended up winning the contest launched by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the art gallery. The new structure, named Arcos rojos , proposed to further integrate the bridge with the museum, adopting its curvilinear forms.

On August 11, 2017, the restoration of the work was completed on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the museum that was celebrated that year.