This is a gondola hanging from a venturesome steel construction connecting both riversides and serves as a car and pedestrian ferry form Getxo to Portugalete on the other side of the river.
It was built in 1893 and designed by Alberto Palacio, one of Gustave Eiffel's disciples and is World Heritage since 2006. I had a closer look at it and then went into a Bar just in front of the bridge for a second breakfast before I cruised back along the river.
This town had a strange but fascinating aura. You could still feel the natural beauty of the area despite the industrial and urban development. The town consisted of a wild mix of bustling and abandoned harbour facilities, buildings from the Franco era uttering a clearly fascist message, some scattered older historical buildings, the monotone if not to say ugly apartment blocks from the seventies and eighties, a yachting harbour and the rural buildings of the ancient fishing village. Some areas felt morbid and there was a certain layer of tension lying over the whole community. The town was exhaling a very turbulent recent history in a way that I have only felt at the D-Day coast in Normandy and certain parts of Berlin.
Later I found out that Getxo was a major battle field during the peak of the Basque conflict in den late Franco era with several ETA attacks. Quite a few of the Basque independence activists were born in Getxo and the murals and graffiti in the narrow and steep alleys of Algorta gave a clear indication of who is in command here.
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