El Valle Trenzado Bridge

El Valle Trenzado – the award-winning pedestrian highway

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Wednesday 30th December, 2015

On 7 December 2015, industry leaders came together to award the Grupo Aranea collective with the coveted Barbara Cappochin Prize for the design and innovation behind El Valle Trenzado, at Elche Ravine in Spain. It was a project that, according to the jury board, resolved the city’s environmental problems with “a brave sketch” and bold solutions.

Organised every two years, the Barbara Cappochin Prize is one of the most prestigious of its kind worldwide. It highlights the quality of work of deserving designers and builders to demonstrate the vital role that architecture plays in the future of our landscape.

Elche Revine

El Valle Trenzado, at Elche Ravine in Spain. Image courtesy of worldarchitecture.org

Bridging the divide

With their landscaping an urban development project, architect Francisco Leiva Ivorra and engineer Maria Garcia Chico designed a series of pedestrian footbridges to connect the steep slopes of the ravine in Alicante, Spain. The result is a public space that makes the area wholly accessible to its users, and reconnects them to the city park.

El Valle Trenzado prioritised recovering pedestrians’ traffic footprint in its design, but it also serves to create an enjoyable walking route for the citizens of the city. The winning Spanish duo Ivorra and Chico took into account the key points that needed connecting and the most-requested routes, and incorporated this into the winning project.

Environmental impact

The bed of Vinalopo River is at the heart of the city of Elche, its ecosystem and the project. The 40-metre deep ravine previously divided, quite literally, Elche’s surrounding citizens on either side. However, the riverbed’s regeneration has not only meant the connection of these sides for easier access for its residents, but also the recovery of the native vegetation.

The ‘Braided Valley’ connects the city’s green zones and improves access to the river through interlacing orchards, gardens and a man-made beach. But it’s the interweaving walkways that have really drawn attention. They’re made of concrete, a material that the jury appreciated Grupo Aranea had transformed into a tool of landscape design.

As has been demonstrated here, there’s clearly a lot to be said for simple yet effective designs that not only take into account the improvement of the aesthetic of a cityscape, but also place its residents’ needs at the forefront of plans. The reward simply comes with local residents making the scheme their own and incorporating it into their everyday lives – something that El Valle Trenzado has certainly achieved.

Group Aranea, the brains behind the award-winner, was originally founded in 1998 by the aforementioned Marta Garcia Chico and Francisco Leiva Ivorra, and has since grown into a diverse grouping of architects, engineers, landscape architects, biologists and sociologists. As a company, its aim is to create a network of exchanges and weave a ‘spider web’ of relationships – an objective they’ve more than met with ‘the Braided Valley’.

This is a project that has helped connect a town both physically and emotionally, drawing on community spirit and the involvement of all its users coming together to see the vision realised. A fine example of what can be achieved in our cityscapes when so many groups of people come together.

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