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.