Bizkaia Bridge

This guide to the Bizkaia Bridge in Bilbao opens before dawn on June 17, 1937, with an explosion tearing through the cables overhead while engineer Alberto Palacio watches from a house in Portugalete. It rewinds to 1893, when Palacio, trained under Gustave Eiffel, solved the problem of crossing a harbor jammed with tall-masted ships by hanging a gondola from a steel frame instead of building a bridge deck. You'll hear how that idea became the world's first transporter bridge, still ferrying passengers today. Look up at the four towers framing the crossing as your gondola glides across.