Monitoring of the Alamillo cable-stayed bridge during construction

The Alamillo Bridge is one of the long-span bridges crossing the Guadalquivir River. It was built on the occasion of Expo '92 in 1992 in Sevilla, Spain. The bridge is a cable-stayed structure spanning 200 m without any intermediate supports. Its originality is the lack of back stays and the balancing of the front stays through the backward inclination of a massive pylon. This paper shows the importance of experimental in situ techniques when applied to unconventional civil engineering structures and how—with the help of an important amount of accurate instrumentation, monitoring the most important experimental variables—it was possible to build the bridge correctly, safely, and on schedule.