E.T.S.I. Civil Engeeniering
The Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de Madrid, was founded in 1802 by Agustín de Bethancourt, Inspector General of the Body of Civil Engineers as the School for the Professional Training of Engineers from the body.
The School, according to its founder, was set up to teach mechanics and hydraulic architecture, with all of the applications necessary for the construction of roads, bridges and canales as well as other works or particular objects related to them.
The fundamental objective of its creation was the need to provide the Body of Highway Engineers, which had just been set up, with a School for training at the highest technical level in order to face the challenge of creating and maintaining the incipient network of basic infrastructures that the country was beginning to construct systematically at that time.
Over time, and just like the Escuela de Ponts et Chaussés de París, founded forty years later and modelled on the Spanish School of Civil Engineers, the School became one of the most prestigious centres in Spanish society in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a training centre for the elite general engineers who had a great influence on the social and political life in Spain at the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th.
Renowned luminaries such as Echegaray, La Cierva, Torres-Quevedo, Saavedra, Cerdá, Torroja, Aguirre, Fernández Casado and numerous others who formed part of the technical, industrial and intellectual vanguard of the country for many years all studied at the School.
Until 1957, the school was accountable to the Ministry of Public Works as it was basically an incubator for civil servants for this Ministry. In 1957, as a result of the passing of the Law for the Reform of Technical Teaching, the School became accountable to the Ministry of National Education and was integrated into the Polytechnic University of Madrid.
The School was for more than a hundred and fifty years the only school for Civil Engineers in the country, thus making it the oldest of the five Civil Engineering Schools in Spain.