Ronda Bridge

The "New Bridge" at Ronda, Spain

As usual, it started with a link to a photograph online.  And, as usual, it came from my beloved L.  And as so often happens, it prompted some digging to Find Out More.  I love it when this happens.

All I had to go on was that the photo was probably taken in Spain.  Spain is a big country, and has lots of bridges.  You knew that already, didn’t you?  Well, so did I, but the knowledge was no help at all.

It was quite a search, but in the end I managed to find out that it’s the Puente Nuevo (“New Bridge”) in Ronda, Andalusia.  And it ain’t so new, either – it was built in 1751, across the El Tajo Canyon.  The Ronda Tourist Board delightfully says of the previous bridge there:

Unfortunately, this bridge did not work, because it collapsed, bringing to death more or less to 50 people.

Yes, I guess that’s a faulty bridge all right.  No wonder they stopped using it and built another.

It’s utterly beautiful to me.  I don’t know why.  It just is.  It should be ugly, but it has enough coolness and sense of “what the fuck” about it to elevate it to the realm of loveliness.

It looks like it’s bigger than it looks.  I know that doesn’t make much sense, but somehow you get the impression, gawping at photographs, that you’re constantly underestimating its size.  It’s probably difficult to convey that in photographs.

One day, I’d love to revisit Spain, and this time not be drawn to the Mediterranean.  I’ve been there five times in all, each time on that same sea, and there’s so much I’ve not seen.  I blame kids.  Not just my own kids, whose presence restricted the last three visits to the coast, but to myself and my sister, who did likewise when our own parents took us.

Back to the Puente Nuevo, as a building it’s another ideal candidate for digital reconstruction in OpenSim.  The problem is, it’s nothing without its canyon to straddle, and OpenSim’s terrain doesn’t take kindly to tall, steep faces – it stretch ground textures to a ridiculous extent.  So if I ever did make the time to build it, you’d have a beautiful bridge astride a damned ugly canyon, unless you build the canyon out of prim objects, which never works well, especially with light.  Shame.