Route The river Ebro

1. Luis Buñuel Water Park

The 0 km of Zaragoza´s Green Ring is placed next to the Third Millennium Bridge, a perfect place to start this route walking or cycling. Coming from Zaragoza Delicias Intermodal Station, we arrive at this stylish bridge through a fly footbridge - both infrastructures made by the engineer Juan Jose Arenas de Pablo. Beautiful views can be seen from this bridge that crosses the Ebro without any halfway support, thanks to its impressive arch without cables for supporting the board. At the other side, we can see the 120 ha of Luis Buñuel Water Park, which includes important works of art of the Expo Programme. The majority of them are not included in our route. Upstream, at the north-eastern point of the meander formed on the left bank, we can see the provocative work commissioned by Expoagua Zaragoza 2008 to the local artist Lara Almárcegui named An Open Ground on an Ebro Bank, which pretends -as in other works of her brilliant international curriculum- to makes us think about the alterations that we provoke in the environment. But, unlike other of her temporary works made for public use, this one is permanent and access is forbidden to visitors since the goal is to preserve it from human action during, at least during 75 years, and to serve as perennial testimony of how this place was and how is progressively modelled by the Ebro floods. Maybe, afraid of the floods that, without any doubt, would have destroyed the fragile Waterwheel of Peace, set up by Sirian artisans coming from Hama, this infrastructure was placed on a canal, even though, due to its small slope and bends in right angle, the water does not take enough pressure to move the waterwheel in an autonomous way. Therefore, it only works when set in motion. Due to this and the use of concrete for the supporting structures, Nicolas Camoisson and Marion Coudert, who in 2006 took part successfully in Expoaguas bid to build a Mesopotamic traditional waterwheel such as those of the river Orontes, decided to quit. There was an important controversy in 2008, when the project was abandoned. These changes have produced that, instead of a traditional useful machine, these kind of waterwheels have become simply a contemporary work of art.

The same philosophical digressions were provoked by the conceptual work commissioned to Antoni Muntadas and Eulalia Valldosera, but we will not comment on this here since they are temporary works.