General Map

El Baúl Bridge

El Baúl Bridge

A 20th century wrought iron structure, designed by Eiffel, it is now an attraction on the Greenway, offering unique landscapes and diverse ecosystems.
The Baúl bridge is a complex wrought iron structure, designed in the workshops of the well-known Alexandre Gustave Eiffel and assembled in 1907 to complete the section between Guadix and Baza, on the line that for much of the 20th century linked Granada with Murcia. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is experiencing a new stage as it has become one of the main attractions of the Vía Verde Sierra de Baza, which runs for 50 kilometres from the old Gor station to El Hijate, after passing through Baúl, Baza and Caniles. The bridge, like the entire route of the old track, has a new opportunity to continue to be the axis of connection of a complex territory, in which arid ecosystems succeed one another with ecological islets connected to the Sierra de Baza.the residents of Baúl remember the passing of the trains and how from Christmas 1984, the thunderous voice of the locomotives was replaced by a permanent silence. But although the tracks and their sleepers have disappeared from the bridge and the railway line, they have not ceased to pass over a structure that is part of the landscape, inherent in the daily life, because it is still the way to connect the houses and lands located on both sides of the cuts of the stream. Now, in addition to this daily use, there is the presence of people from Gor and Baza who walk along the paths that once occupied the old rails to see the landscapes of the northeast of Granada, and to observe the remains of industrial elements that follow one another on both sides of the structures, such as water intakes, railway switches, and elements that for decades were the hope for the future of a region.In Baúl, next to the bridge, one can still breathe the air of modernity of the first decades of industrialisation and internationality of the Iberian southeast, when the main communication axis was created by a company called The Granada Railway Company Limited, a subsidiary of the Great Southern of Spain Railway. On 31 December 1984, the highland train made its last journey and left behind structures that three decades later are a fundamental part of the image and of a territory that can once again be influenced by new ways of communicating and observing the landscape.