Photo of a Spanish Adobe Arch Bridge, Batangas-Nasugbu Road [July 1914, BPW Quarterly Bulletin]

This photograph is part of a series showing mostly construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.

Because the American colonial government started creating a road network in Batangas as early as 1900, partly to help its Army mount operations against Filipino revolutionaries during the Philippine-American War, it goes without saying that the construction of bridges was a necessary requirement for the completion of the network.

In the July 1914 quarterly bulletin of the Bureau of Public Works, it was mentioned that there were still a good number of Spanish-era bridges still in existence in Batangas at the time. One of these was the Spanish adobe arch bridge shown in the picture below.

First built during the Spanish colonial era, it was rebuilt by the Americans in 1911, with “the concrete apron and spillway having been built at this time, and the adobe abutment repaired.” This bridge was at about kilometer 119 of the Batangas-Nasugbu Road. Cross-referenced against a Batangas Road System Map, the bridge should have been between the towns of Batangas and Bauan but closer to the latter.

¹ “Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin, Volume 2 No. 4,” compiiled by C.A. Tansill, published July 1914 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.