Pont de La Daurade

About

The bridge of La Daurade is an old bridge that crossed the Garonne in Toulouse. It linked the Faubourg Saint-Cyprien, on the left bank of the river, to the monastery of the Daurade and to the church of the same name, on the right bank. It was the second masonry bridge built on the Garonne in Toulouse, after the bridge-aqueduct, raised in Gallo-Roman times in the first century.

It was built in the second half of the 12th century in stone and brick masonry, but frequent flooding led the municipal authorities to gradually replace the brick vaults with wooden aprons as they were carried away. The bridge was covered in 1480, making it known as Pont Couvert. In the 16th century, his poor condition had his replacement envisaged, and in 1541 King Francis I decided to build Pont Neuf, slightly upstream.

It was completed in 1632 and the bridge of the Daurade, which was then designated as the Old Bridge, was abandoned shortly afterwards, in 1639, after new floods which destroyed it again. The ruins of the bridge gradually disappeared in the eighteenth century and only the first arch of the bridge, on the side of the Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques...