On June 21, the lower step of the Botín de Santander Center was put into service, in what is the first milestone of an urban intervention promoted by the Botín Foundation and that the city will historically modify by allowing the center to definitely join its Bay thanks to the expansion of the Pereda gardens.
The opening to traffic has been witnessed by the Director of Institutional and International Relations of the Botín Foundation, Carolina Botín; the president of Cantabria, Ignacio Diego; the mayor of Santander, Iñigo de la Serna; and the president of the Port Authority, José Joaquín Martínez Sieso. Next to them has been the general director of the Foundation, Iñigo Sáenz de Miera; Bovis Land Lease Ana Palencia Project Manager; and responsible for the construction company, OHL and ASCAN.
The authorities have highlighted the opportunity involved in the city the disappearance of traffic at a point as sensitive as the dock as well as the next fusion with the urban center through extended and transformed Pereda gardens. Both the lower step and the Pereda gardens will be officially inaugurated on July 22.
The tunnel work began on November 8, 2012 and has been an investment of 10.7 million euros provided by the Botín Foundation within the Botín Center project. This new access will allow a traffic of 6.7 million vehicles in the west-east sense (Marques de la Hermida to Puertochico) and from 6.2 million in the east-west sense (Puertochico sense-Castilla Street).
The lower step of the Botin center allows the pedestrian union of the Maura and Albarda docks with the Pereda gardens; and, by extension, with the urban plot of Santander, when the barrier that supposes vehicle traffic through the dock is eliminated. In addition, the capacity of vehicle traffic will improve, when the semaphoric regulation is eliminated, and it is achieved that the access to the parking lots of Alfonso XIII and Cachavas maintain or even better their current capabilities.
The traffic at this point is buried in a length of 219 meters, which are those that are enabled to pedestrianly unite the maritime front with the city's historic, commercial and social center. The infrastructure has a total length of 372m, of which 219 are buried and the rest are distributed in 87 meters for the western mouth and 66 meters for the mouth.
The cross section consists of two sidewalks of 1.20m wide, two lanes per direction of 3.40m wide, each and an intermediate zone of 1.50m, with two arcenes of 0.50m and a barrier of central containment , to form a minimum total width of 17.50m. At all points of the road, located in the buried area, a vertical minimum 5.00m gálibo is guaranteed.
Inside the lower pass of the building.
The Botín Center
The Botín Center project, the work of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop study, in collaboration with Luis Vidal and architects, aims to create a space for art, culture and training activity and generate a new meeting place in Santander that brings the city center to bay. For this, the building will be as important as the public spaces that will be created around and the new Pereda gardens that, thanks to the lower step, will bend their current extension.
The building is organized in two volumes, which will be united by a structure of spaces and catwalks that will become the main distributor. The western volume will be dedicated to art, with an exhibition hall of 2,500 square meters. The east volume (the smallest size) will be dedicated to education and culture.
The Botín Foundation will allocate about 80 million euros to the construction of the building, of which 15 million will be for the lower step, and another 15 to remodel and update the Pereda gardens, which will pass from two to four hectares. It is the greatest private investment in a cultural infrastructure in Spain. The construction is in charge of OHL-AASCAN and the management and management of work execution is the responsibility of Bovis Lend Lease.