De nuevo sobre el Puente de Aljucén en la Vía de la Plata

Abstract

A few years ago, with D. Juan Diaz Pintiado, we turned our attention to a somewhat forgotten Roman bridge, located in the vicinity of the village of Aljucen, near Merida. The bridge in question lay on the route of the ≪ Via de la Plata ≫, the iter ab Emerita Asturicam, which, for all the efforts of various scholars, was never located and was even confused with the bridge existing on main Road 630. The reason lay on its almost complete dismantling in the XVIIIth c. and the smothering of the ruins underneath the vegetation and the silts of the river Aljucen. The discovery at a later date of drawings preserved by the San Fernando’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes, the work of Fernando Rodriguez from Merida at the end of the XVIIIth c., which present a scale drawing of the ground level and height of the vestiges of the bridge, enables us today to complete the data we had then presented on that noteworthy building.

Keywords

• Via de la Plata
• bridge
• architectural structure
• Merida bridges
• Fernando Rodriguez