Access to Bilbao via San Mamés
The gateway to and from the capital of Bizkaia most used by drivers
Finished
Finished
Finished
In construction
In construction
In construction
In construction
Aerial view of the motorway junction at Sabino Arana with vehicles in motion.
Bus travelling along the motorway.
Aerial view of the motorway with cars driving along Sabino Arana street with the Plaza del Sagrado Corazón in the background.
Aerial view of the motorway junction between the surrounding buildings.
Worker cutting a strip of metal barrier with a radial saw.
Worker behind a vertical signpost.
3 excavators hammering an area of the bridge.
View of a piece of demolished deck.
Aerial view of the excavators working next to the buildings.
View of a deck section demolition in fast motion with 3 excavators.
Iron hanging from a piece of demolished deck.
Bridge deck with steel debris hanging down, partially demolished and with a crane in the vicinity.
Excavator and a dump truck being loaded.
2 excavators chopping up a piece of the bridge while an operator with a hose is pouring water over the debris.
4 excavators cutting into the supporting walls of the bridge abutments.
Excavators breaking up a bridge pier.
2 excavators breaking up a bridge pier and bringing it down onto the roadway.
Aerial view of a lattice crane with the partially demolished decks.
View of an operator with a cutting machine between the buildings.
Wire-cutting machine on the asphalt.
Operators standing next to a lifting tool for the panels.
Rebars being inserted into holes drilled in the panels.
Crane loading counterweights during the night.
Crane loading a large piece of deck at night in Autonomía Street.
Neighbour in Sabino Arana street looking out of a window at a piece of demolished deck.
Suspended deck being deposited on the ground at night with the houses in Sabino Arana street in the background.
3 excavators chopping up the remains of a roadway next to another roadway that still needs to be demolished.
View of 3 excavators chopping up the remains of a road surface with 2 water hoses soaking the rubble.
Night image of the elevation of a piece of roadbed with the nearby buildings illuminated.
The same image during the day.
Succession of day and night images from the same location removing successive decks.
Crane lifting a large piece of deck.
Crane lifting a deck next to the buildings and close to the motorway.
View of the lattice crane lifting another piece of board with Sabino Arana street in the background.
The same view, but at night with the buildings illuminated.
Removal of another adjacent deck section, but this time during the day.
View of the lattice crane with the lifting tool ready to remove another piece of board.
The same image at night with buildings illuminated.
The same image by day with an adjacent piece of deck.
Aerial view of the area around Sabino Arana with the half-built San Mamés football pitch and the Plaza del Sagrado Corazón in the background.
The construction of the new accesses to Bilbao via San Mamés required four and a half years of work and an investment of 215 million euros. The opening of the new entrances and exits of the capital of Bizkaia took place early in the morning of Saturday 18 May 2013.
The infrastructure is made up of four cut-and-cover tunnels, from 110 to 340 metres long (Santa Ana, Santiago, San Nicolás, and Bentazarra); four viaducts, between 57 and 323 metres, and a 351-metre-long tunnel excavated under Altamira.
The remodelling of the accesses to Bilbao posed a major challenge, both technically and in terms of human resources, with the added difficulty of maintaining traffic on the A-8 trunk road during the works. The undergrounding of this infrastructure as it passes through the Lezeaga neighbourhood, to allow the connection with Bentazarra and Altamira, has freed up tens of thousands of square metres for new urban uses, just as in Avenida de Sabino Arana after the removal of the viaducts.
Since their opening, the new accesses to Bilbao via San Mames have become the gateway to and from the capital of Bizkaia most used by drivers..
They have led to the redistribution of traffic through all the accesses to the capital of Bizkaia.
Their construction was the step prior to the demolition of the Sabino Arana viaducts, the main entrance to the capital for forty years.