Description
The original "New Bridge" on the Guadalquivir channel was a project of the Baeza Council to enhance an alternative route of union between Granada and the Court that passed through Baeza, instead of doing so through Bailén and thus also enable better communication with other nearby villages such as Jimena and Bedmar, of which food and goods were provided.
Thanks to an important documentation preserved in the Royal Chancellery of Granada, published by J. P. Cruz Cabrera, we know much of its constructive process. In 1561 the work was started according to a first trace designed by the Baezan quarry Ginés Martínez, reciting the material execution of the works in the Juanes de la Carrera and Pedro de Mazuecos, neighbors of Canena and Ubeda, respectively. The intervention of Pedro de Mazuecos in this work led to the popularly known bridge as "de Mazuecos" since the 17th century.
The bridge designed by Ginés Martínez was one-eye, wide light and 100 feet wide. Shortly after the works began, and after the inspections of various quarries, the project of this bridge, with a narrow and narrow profile, was abandoned to begin the construction of another of greater scale. From 1565 there is a documentary record of the intervention in the work of the famous singers Andrés de Vandelvira and Francisco del Castillo "El Joven," which gave a radical turn to the initial idea by projecting a monumental bridge more specific to a city than to a rural property. The traces, signed by both quarries and preserved in the above-mentioned documentation, allow us to know their configuration.
The plateau includes a large central arch of a half-point of 33 meters of light between four thick semi-cylindrical pillars with tachamars; the area facing the villa of Jimena is built directly into the rock in a descending way and only a small arc of discharge was worked; on the side facing Baeza, also descending, the composition is more complex due to the strong change of level, being formed by a sewer in the base and double line of half-point arches in the way of the Roman aqueducts, from which only the lower one is preserved; in this area of the bridge with the vaults were installed, in addition to a few of the vaults, and in a half-vaults.
They were used for storage and even leased. The work as a whole presented a careful aesthetic, both in terms of its architectural composition and in the decorative details; the ancestors, the balls of the rivets, the cardines of the pillars, the molding with double thread of the great central arch, the tones of the gears, among other elements, certainly embellished its image, radically disfigured after the intervention practiced following the sinking of the great central arch at the beginning of the 20th century; the central arc was replaced by an adintel metal structure and to adapt it to the rogiven traffic other original compositives disappear.
Vandelvira and Castillo show on this bridge, once again, their extensive knowledge of classicism as well as an extraordinary practice of stereotomy or cutting of the quarry stone. The Mazuecos bridge, which has a great resemblance to that of Ariza, a work also of Vandelvira, is to be related to that of Benamejí (Córdoba), made by Hernán Ruiz "El Mozo" between 1550- 1556. Vandelvira and Castillo, perhaps more intensively, conceive a bridge in which ornamental and constructive details are inserted clearly Italian. We must not forget, however, that it will be Vandelvira who carries the bulk of the work, participating Castillo with him in the assessments. In addition, without subtracting merit from the contribution of Castillo, Vandelvira, when working on the bridge of Mazuecos, is already an experienced architect in this type of work, as close to those carried out by the council of Ubeda on the bridge of Ariza on the avenue of the Guadalimar, more distant those practiced on the great bridge of San Pablo in Cuenca, and, for the same time, those of the bridge on the river Guadalmena, between the current terms of Siles (Jaén) and Montiel (Ciudad Real), for the Order of Santiago, whose remains are still unseen in their ingraceful shores.
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