Porto invites you to decide on name of future 7th bridge over Douro River

The connecting infrastructure itself will be ready by the end of 2025

The City of Porto is inviting residents, or anyone else for that matter, to vote on and decide the name of the upcoming seventh bridge over the Douro River, expected to be ready by the end of 2025.

People can vote online and pick one of the six proposed options. The voting end deadline has been set for 6 May. After that, a selection committee will announce the decision on 2 June.

The yet-to-be-named and yet-to-be-built bridge will be part of the Ruby Line of the local metro and it will serve to expand the public transit choices for the residents with the estimate that it will help in the moving of 11.4 million metro users between Casa da Musica and Santo Ovidio, linking the municipalities of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia.

The six options for a name

The selection committee has narrowed it down to six choices that digital voters can consider. These are as follows: Good Journey, Douro, Ferreirinha, Good Passage, Unity or Engineer Joaquim Sarmento.

The first suggestion – “Ponte da Boa Viagem” (Good Journey) is “an appeal to the maritime tradition and the strong connection to the sea of ​​the people who live on both banks of the Douro”. The commission underlines that the future metro line will pass next to the chapel, in Massarelos, with the same name, where “the men of the sea used to worship”.

The name “Ponte Douro” itself needs no explanation. The Douro, notes the committee “is what separates and, at the same time, connects the two banks. It is the great unifying element. It is the one with which communities on both sides of the river identify themselves, which determined their lives and the 'identity of these lands'”.

Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira (Ferreirinha), “an outstanding figure of the Douro”, was a “unifying person not only of the Porto-Gaia area, but also of the entire Douro, including its history, and of Port wine”. She was a celebrated 19th-century businesswoman and wine merchant.

In honour of the Cruzeiro do Senhor da Boa Passagem, which is still on the shore of Vila Nova de Gaia, and in the place where the pillory was destroyed by the great flood of 1909, the workgroup also proposes to name the future structure “Ponte da Boa Passagem” (Good Passage).

"Despite referring to "another passage", that of earthly life to eternal life, it is also identified with the river passage itself, secularly ensured by a ferry service, so characteristic of these lands", adds the commission.

And because that's what bridges are for, “Ponte da União” is the fifth suggestion, a way of celebrating the “secular union between the two cities” and the “connections that time has deepened, the unity between the two shores, unity among the people who populated them”.

Finally, the commission gives the possibility to name the structure in honour of “one of the most prestigious names in Portuguese engineering”, author of the old Estádio das Antas, the churches of Carvalhido and Antas, and the markets of Matosinhos and Bom Sucesso. “Ponte Engenheiro Joaquim Sarmento” would celebrate the first Portuguese to receive the Leonardo da Vinci Prize.