The need to communicate with both sides at the mouth of the port without interrupting the constant navigation that took place at the end of the 19th century led to this solution. The landscape is marked by an estuary, already almost in the sea, which separates two towns, Portugalete on the left and the neighbourhood of Las Arenas, of the municipality of Getxo on the right.
Both towns are linked by the first transporter bridge in the world, designed by Alberto de Palacio Elissagüe and Ferdinand Joseph Arnodin and inaugurated on July 28, 1893. It consists of two large iron lattice towers, 61 m high, joined by a margin-to-margin crossbar of 160 m in length that leaves a navigation gauge of 45 m on the high tide. A wheeled iron runs through this crossbar, from which hangs a cabin suspended in the air by steel cables, designed by Arnodin, capable of loading up to six cars simultaneously.
A structure that is a World Heritage Site and the daily transport of people who cross to the other shore to go to work, study or carry on with their daily lives. Very close to the Bizkaia Bridge, still survives a boat that crosses the estuary endlessly, from side to side, carrying people to whom the distance of an arm of the sea like this one does not prevent them from getting to their destination, on the opposite side.
At this point, the estuary can be crossed walking, on wheels, on the water and through the air, on the platform above.
