photobyjohnbo

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 is from the 15th century, and the town is on the English Way path of the Camino de Santiago. I suspect that the tour guide didn’t give us enough information when he referred to the bridge as “The Old Bridge” and commented that 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 that I occasionally feature bridges in my posts, but I like to describe the origination and some engineering details, as well as 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 to Luminar Neo, it was slow going as my processor was working overtime to tweak all of the pixels. To top it off, Lightroom failed to watermark the image even after it was reduced to 4K HD, so I used Luminar’s layering function to manually watermark the image for sharing. Click on the image above to view it in 4K on my Flickr site.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner

43 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

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