From the heights

Who can forget the iconic image of workers eating on a beam while building the Empire State Building? There's no need to go quite that far to find a similar scene in Spain. In 1961, a team of technicians were 150 metres up in the air building the high-voltage towers for the lines crossing the Bay of Cadiz. And a very similar- though much safer - scene has just been repeated during replacement of the cables and electrical elements of these two giants of industrial engineering.

Jose Antonio Corbacho is a technician who has always worked at height. "I was 20 when I joined Endesa on 1 July 1987. Everyone called me the kid. When they needed someone to scale a high-voltage pylon to change something, they sent the kid - I loved it", he recalls, fearlessly watching the work now done by his younger colleagues from his vantage point 50-floors up in these towers.

As the workers descend one by one, they all greet Jose Antonio. He is their reference point. "No one can stop him, the youngest ones say: he climbs the 800 steps of the spiral staircase as if it were his home," they laugh, while removing the safety equipment that has enabled them to climb what was the tallest infrastructure in Cadiz until the Constitution Bridge was built.

"My wife looks at the weather forecast and tells me to be more careful if there is wind or rain, and she says the same thing to my son, who has inherited my passion for working at height. He's been up here too," he says, pointing to the chain of insulators suspended from the iconic towers, "in fact, he has a picture of working on these towers in his living room, and so do I. Imagine what it's like when the two of us get together. We start talking about electricity towers as though they were the most normal thing in the world, and my wife can't take it," he laughs.

Jose Antonio never switches off while he is speaking. He is always watching the work being done. "We have been preparing this work for almost a year. These towers are unique feats of industrial engineering. They were designed by an Italian engineer and inspired by the Messina Towers and the Moscow Television Tower, which was built in 1922. The challenge was to connect Cadiz, and this was considered the best system at the time. There are six cables stretching more than 2,500 metres each across the bay, and these have a tension to keep the cables upright as if nine cars were pulling each cable from each end. Changing it has been a challenge. People think they just have to flick a switch, and everything is automatic. But there is a lot of work behind the scenes. We have to do a lot of maintenance for the facilities, the pylons, and then there are our colleagues our in the field checking the lines," he says, visibly excited.