The Dragon Bridge, Ljubljana's emblem over the Ljubljanica

A bridge born of an earthquake

A wooden bridge, the Butchers’ Bridge, stood here until the 1895 earthquake damaged it. Its replacement was built while Ivan Hribar was mayor and opened in 1901 under another name, the Jubilee Bridge, marking forty years of Franz Joseph I’s reign. It had commemorative plaques in Slovene and German, but the official name soon fell out of use and people started calling it after what they could see, the dragons.

The interesting part is inside. According to the city, it was built in reinforced concrete using the method of the Austrian engineer Josef Melan, on an arch of iron girders that meant no temporary scaffolding was needed. It was Ljubljana’s first reinforced concrete structure, one of the first concrete bridges in Europe, and its 33.34-metre arch was the third longest on the continent at the time. Later it became the first Slovenian bridge to be surfaced with asphalt, and it was thoroughly restored in 1983 and 1984. Today it is a protected technical monument.

How many dragons are on the Dragon Bridge?

Twenty. The decoration was designed by the Dalmatian architect Jurij Zaninović, in Art Nouveau style with plant motifs, and the stars are the four large dragons of wrought sheet metal guarding the corners. The rest are smaller and scattered across the structure, and you find them if you stop and look.

The dragon is Ljubljana’s emblem and sits on its coat of arms. The explanation LPP gives on its tourist train is a legend. Jason, carrying the Golden Fleece, sailed up the Danube, the Sava and the Ljubljanica to a great lake where he killed a monster. That monster is the city’s dragon.

The bridge, the market and the riverside walk

The bridge crosses the Ljubljanica north-east of Vodnik Square, so the natural thing is to see it with the Ljubljana Central Market, which starts right there. From the Triple Bridge it is a few minutes downstream, past the Butchers’ Bridge. If you take a boat, the 45-minute cruise sold by the bus station turns round right here, which is a good way to see it from below; more on the Ljubljanica river.

There are no opening hours or tickets. It is a road bridge in the city centre, open all the time, and it looks much better lit up at night.

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Ljubljana before Plečnik

For me, the Dragon Bridge explains the Ljubljana that existed before Plečnik. The city that rose from the 1895 earthquake wanted to be modern, and it did it with concrete, Art Nouveau and a nod to its own legend. Three decades later Plečnik gave the river the look it has today. If that second layer interests you, carry on with Plečnik’s Ljubljana and you will have both cities in one afternoon.

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