Puente de la Mujer

Interesting facts

The rotating central span, 102.5 metres long, swings 90 degrees on a white concrete pylon and can open a passage for boats in under two minutes.

Its inclined steel mast, about 34 metres tall with a concrete core, leans at 39 degrees and anchors the cables that carry the swinging span.

The whole bridge is 170 metres long and 6.2 metres wide, and weighs about 800 tonnes.

The name comes from the district itself: many streets in Puerto Madero are named after women.

The steelwork, costing about US$6 million, was fabricated by the Urssa company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in Spain's Basque Country.

Businessman Alberto L. González conceived the bridge and donated money for its construction.

According to one account, an advertising executive hired to promote Puerto Madero argued that a landmark footbridge would solve the district's access problem better than any campaign.

The design echoes Calatrava's Alamillo Bridge in Seville and Sundial Bridge in California, but here the mast leans forward rather than backward.

Buenos Aires declared the bridge part of the city's cultural heritage in 2018, less than two decades after it opened.

In 2022 the deck was resurfaced for the first time, using plastic wood made from bottles collected at the city's recycling points.

Why it is worth it

Santiago Calatrava designed this footbridge as a piece of choreography rather than a piece of infrastructure: a fixed white mast leans over the dock at an angle, and from it hangs a single curving span that the architect has described outright as two tango dancers, the mast the man, the deck the woman bending around him. It's an unusually literal metaphor for a structure that also has a very literal engineering job to do — Puerto Madero's old dock basins still carry boat traffic, so the bridge's central section is built to rotate a full 90 degrees on a pivot, swinging out of the way rather than lifting or splitting like most opening bridges.

Completed in December 2001, it was Calatrava's first project built in Latin America, arriving as Puerto Madero — a stretch of 19th-century brick warehouses along disused docks — was being converted from derelict port infrastructure into what is now one of Buenos Aires's most expensive districts. The bridge is often cited as the single structure that made the renovated docklands legible on a map: a sculptural landmark dropped into a neighborhood otherwise defined by converted grain silos and glass office towers.

Good to know

The central span still does its job: it opens on a rotation schedule, typically around mid-morning, to let boats through the dock. Times shift with river traffic, so treat any specific hour as indicative rather than guaranteed.

Getting there

Located in Buenos Aires. Aeroparque Jorge Newbery (AEP) is about 7 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Puente de la Mujer is a rotating footbridge for Dock 3 of the Puerto Madero commercial district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is of the cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge type and is also a swing bridge, but somewhat unusual in its asymmetrical arrangement. It has a single mast with cables suspending a portion of the bridge which rotates 90 degrees in order to allow water traffic to pass. When it swings to allow watercraft passage, the far end comes to a resting point on a stabilizing pylon.

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