AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW
I was born in 1942 and last 33 of 32 I turned 72 Fahrenheit years old, no less. In 1966, when I was 23, I finished my seven years of studies in our lovely Retiro School in Madrid, although it actually used to take more than seven years to complete it. Then, I decided to embrace the professional life to be what I had decided to be: a civil engineer. Forty six years later, I think I can say –with good pride- that I am and I feel more like an engineer than ever. And I have never stopped being one. Many things have changed in our country since 1966; essentially for the better. And the incredible progress in infrastructures and in public works -the works of everybody- has contributed to this end. I have been a witness and a central figure, like many others, of those changes that we are enjoying today and which most of us are not prepared to renounce. However, some of them have been developed by incompetence, greed or at the wrong time. Once I finished my studies –although I have never stopped studying-, I started to work for Cubiertas and MZOV in the design and construction of bridges over the new channel of the Turia River. This project completely transformed Valencia and solved its flooding problems for good. I became part of an experienced team which came, most of it, from Venezuela and Angola: “Portuñol” (Spanish and Portuguese) was our everyday language. During 1969 I worked in Paris, in the outstanding engineering company created around Freyssinet. I made the most of my time. I complemented my academic background by working in different projects related to bridges and prestressed concrete structures. In January 1970, back in Spain, I declined opportunities that I had in and outside Spain and I set up the basis of the engineering society, Esteyco, the work of my life. I was 27 years old. I did not have a truly business vocation but I intuited, and I was right, that I needed an organization and a team in order to put into practice my ambitious professional ideas. Later on, I drove the creation of other specialized engineering companies such as Wasser, Knossos and Kinesia among others; and I provided them with all the required tools to “take-off”. We needed tenacity and big efforts to pave our own way. We started from nothing. We hardly had access to hydraulic and port projects which were under construction at the time. There was not tradition of hiring engineering enterprises by the Public Administration. The Ministry of Civil Works, General Directorate of Roads, had some extraordinary regional offices for projects and geological services. In the same way, Hydrographic Confederations had a great team of engineers. In the latest decades, these institutions have gradually declined leading to an authentic impoverishment without anybody feeling guilty of such a terrible outrage. For years, we survived by developing, in the shade, a lot of concrete projects and urban and industrial structure buildings which were usually modestly paid. From time to time, we designed some singular structures or motorway bridges which had been designed by German, Norwegian or even Catalo-American first class engineering companies which were a nursery of prominent engineers.