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Cellpic Sunday – The Old Bridge at Betanzos

Gateway bridge to the city.

Betanzos, Spain.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find any information about this bridge that leads into the Spanish municipality of Betanzos. Even Wikipedia, often my resource of last resort failed me. Oh, there is plenty of information on the Internet about Betanzos, the population is around 13,000 residents. It is part of the autonomous community of Galicia in the province of A Coruña in northwestern Spain. The beautiful old church in the city dates to the 15th century, and the town lies on the English Way path of the Camino de Santiago. I suspect the tour guide didn’t give us enough information when he called the bridge “The Old Bridge” (Ponte Vella) and said the other bridge on the river Mandeo is called the New Bridge (Ponte Nova).

There are many stock photos of the bridge on various websites, but no history or other information only offers to sell the images. Google Maps identifies the old bridge as Puente Viejo and Ponte Vella, and a portion of the walking tour brought us to the river’s edge outside the city. Regular readers know I occasionally feature bridges in my posts, but I like to describe the origin and some engineering details, along with a bit of history. Well, I struck out. Please comment if you have a source of information to tell more of the story of this beautiful old bridge. Sofia Alves of the blog Photographias noted that the bridge was rebuilt in 1577, and provides other details in the comments below.

About the photo: The image is a composite of two photographs captured by my Samsung S20U. Adobe Lightroom processed the image into a panorama of some 19,000 x 9,000 pixels. When I fed it into Luminar Neo, it was slow going, as my processor worked overtime to tweak all the pixels. To top it off, Lightroom failed to watermark the image even after I reduced it to 4K HD, so I used Luminar’s layering function to manually watermark it for sharing. Click on the image above to view it in 4K on my Flickr site.

I invite fellow bloggers to join in by creating their own Cellpic Sunday posts. There’s no set theme. The first rule: your photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or other mobile device. The second rule: link your challenge response to this post or drop a comment here with your link so others can find it. And remember, despite the name, there’s no penalty for sharing on a day other than Sunday.

John Steiner

44 comments

  3. Great photo, John. I managed to find a bit more info about the bridge. There was a bridge there in 1219 and there are records of that one being destroyed by overflowing river. This one dates to 1577 and it had a tower, destroyed between 1820 and 1823. Sorry for the translation, it was all in Spanish 😀
    Here is mine:

    Cellpic Sunday – Glasgow

    Reply

    • Truth is, reflections are so much a part of luck. We had only a few minutes to visit the bridge on our shore excursion, and I was lucky to have the winds light and an interesting sky above.
      Thanks for the compliment!

      Reply

  29. […] During a 2022 visit to Betanzos, I photographed this bridge, which our tour guide described as the town’s gateway. This multi-span stone masonry arch bridge crosses the Mandeo estuary on five semicircular arches spanning roughly 194 feet (59 m), sitting low over Betanzos’ tidal waters. Originally dating back to 1219, the structure was extensively reconstructed in 1577 under architect Juan de Náveda. When I first wrote about it, I couldn’t find English-language resources online, and I don’t speak Spanish or the region’s native Galician. Fellow Lens-Artist Sofia kindly translated some Spanish-language information about the bridge and shared it in the post comments. Read about my experience on the Cellpic Sunday post here. […]

    Reply

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