FCC has had the honour of receiving the Acueducto de Segovia Award for its work on the section of the A-4 south dual carriageway from Venta de Cárdenas, Ciudad Real, to Santa Elena, Jaén, better known as the Despeñaperros bypass. The award was collected by Fernando Moreno, chairman of FCC Construcción, at a ceremony held this Tuesday at the Association of Civil Engineers of Madrid at the close of a workshop entitled, “Roads Out of the Crisis”, which was attended by the governor of the Bank of Spain, Luis María Linde, the president of the Association of Civil Engineers, Juan Santamera, and other industry representatives.

With this award, the Association of Civil Engineers acknowledges that the bypass provides a solution to the problem posed by the historic Despeñaperros Pass and definitively addresses one of the great trouble spots of Spain’s mountain roads, according to the award judges.
Fernando Moreno stated that FCC Construcción brought to the job its experience and a great team of professionals who worked hard to build the Despeñaperros bypass, a major project that benefits many people today.

Helming this great effort at the office of the deputy manager for Spain and North Africa was its leader, Javier Lázaro, together with José Torroja (manager for the Andalusia zone) and José Madrazo (head of the civil engineering works office). The construction work was done by Juan Diego Romero (department head), Pedro Vega (construction manager), Ignacio Ferraro (head of the technical office), Pedro Córdoba (quality head), José Montoro (head surveyor), Salvador González (structure foreman) and hundreds of other professionals. Together they made it possible for Despeñaperros to become a symbol of Spanish engineering.

As part of this award, the prize also went to the designer, Acciona Ingeniería, and the Eastern Andalusia Authority of the Ministry of Development’s Directorate-General of Roads.

The design

The Despeñaperros bypass is a modern road designed under the maxim of guaranteeing environmental sustainability and reducing the time it takes to get through Despeñaperros Pass. The bypass is a dual carriageway with three lanes in each direction, and it is 9.4 kilometres long.

Practically the entire layout lies on rough mountain terrain in Despeñaperros Natural Park. Because of these two factors, the new road contains a long string of viaducts and tunnels whose length accounts for 73% of the total bypass. Between them, the two carriageways have a total of 12 viaducts ranging in length from 156 to 580 metres and five top-down cut-and-cover tunnels varying in length from 197 to 1,925 metres.

Six viaducts have been built, Santa Elena (260 m), El Manantial (371 m), Las Tinajuelas (520 m), Despeñaperros (425 m), Cuchareros (73 m) and Venta de Cárdenas (150 m), across a series of low valleys and the Despeñaperros River.
The new tunnels are named Las Lomas (215 m), La Aliseda (370 m), Tinajuelas (980 m), La Cantera (390 m) and Despeñaperros (1,850 m), and the project also includes improvements to El Corzo Tunnel (372 m). El Corzo and Despeñaperros contain sections for three lanes of traffic.

Because the bypass travels through Despeñaperros Natural Park, a great many measures were applied to reduce and correct the road’s environmental impact, including archaeological prospecting, planting, landscape restoration, protective measures for plant and animal life and watercourses and sound impact reduction measures.

Getting from end to end of this section used to mean travelling 13 kilometre. Now the trip is just nine kilometres, and it takes only seven minutes. When the bypass was opened, in addition to providing better general driving conditions, it permitted motorists to drive at 80 kilometres per hour where the speed limit used to be 50, with wider roadways and a much less winding route.