View of City of Fraga and its Hanging Bridge

Jenaro Pérez Villaamil was the most brilliant landscape painter in Spain. Inspired by the mists and suggestive dense atmospheres used by English painters like David Roberts when painting Spain, he shows the illusory, imagined and fantastic world, somewhere between medieval and fictional, demanded by the bourgeoisie of the time. / However, in this painting, it is surprising that the artist, rather than what he generally painted, has concentrated on a real contemporary object, which concerns the most modern symbols of progress and the emerging industrial landscape: The new suspension bridge over the river Cinca in Fraga. Its building began in August 1845, and the bridge was inaugurated in April 1847, but on 28 September 1852, as a result of a flood, it collapsed taking the people who were crossing with it. As a result, the painting became a splendid and unique testimony of this early piece of engineering.