Mexico's Bridges: Puente El Platanar

I just remembered that we had actually left the state of Colima (at the city of Tonila) and we are now in the state of Jalisco, Mexico.

The next bridge on our trip northward (on Route 54D) is Puente El Planatar. It is a three span precast I-girder bridge on two-column bents and seat-type abutments. El Planatar (translated as the banana grove) is a beautiful colonial village a few miles southeast of the bridge.

This bridge crosses over another river canyon. Note how steep the canyon wall is and the white rock layer near the top.  I wonder if that layer is from a large pyroclastic flow that occurred some time in the region's past.

It's an odd looking and not terribly attractive structure. The concrete is badly stained and the columns were built outside of the thin bent caps.  Perhaps a more monolithic structure makes for a more attractive bridge. For instance, I think the recently viewed Beltran and Pialla bridges (with their sculptural forms) are more attractive structures.

Mexico's Bridges: Puente El Platanar by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.