The predecessor of the Štefánik Bridge was the fourth bridge over the Vltava

Prague - For centuries, there was only one bridge over the Vltava River in Prague - the Charles Bridge. The next crossing was established in 1841 when the predecessor of the current Legion Bridge was opened. Nine years later, the railway Negrelli Viaduct was put into operation, and in May 1868, the predecessor of today’s Štefánik Bridge, the Bridge of Emperor Franz Joseph I, was opened. The road and tramway Štefánik Bridge, which was named Švermův Bridge for half a century, was put into operation in the axis of Revoluční Street 70 years ago on September 29, 1951.

The suspension chain bridge of Emperor Franz Joseph I, colloquially known as Eliščin Bridge after the emperor's wife Elisabeth (Eliška), was constructed starting in 1865 and opened on May 13, 1868. The bridge, which was named Štefánik Bridge from 1919 to 1940, then Leoš Janáček Bridge for five years, and again Štefánik Bridge from 1945 to 1947, was decommissioned in 1941 for safety reasons, and a wooden temporary structure for tram operations was built in parallel. The bridge was dismantled in 1947, and its most valuable parts (movable bearings with parts of cables and cast-iron battlements) were stored in the repository of the technical museum at Invalidovna.

The construction of a new reinforced concrete bridge, named after founding member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Jan Šverma, began at the beginning of 1949. The bridge is 243 meters long and consists of three segmental arches with spans of 59 - 65 meters. The width of the deck is 24.4 meters. The project authors were Oldřich Širc, Vlastislav Hofman, and Václav Dašek. For the first time, steel pipe forms were used in construction, creating lightweight aerial structures. Instead of the unreliable asphalt pavement used on the Jiráskov Bridge, small granite cubes measuring 12x12 cm were used here. The load test took place on September 26, 1951, and regular operation began on September 29, 1951.

This bridge, which is currently the 12th bridge over the Vltava from the south, is connected to the Letná Tunnel, built between 1949 and 1953. Near the bridge, there was a statue of Jan Šverma from 1969 to 1999, but in 1997 the bridge was renamed to Štefánik Bridge. The most recent major reconstruction of the bridge took place in 2007.

Currently, there are 19 bridges over the Vltava in Prague, including 12 road bridges, four railway bridges, two pedestrian bridges, and one tram bridge. The most recent, the nineteenth bridge over the Vltava, the Lochkov Bridge on the Prague ring road R1, was opened on September 20, 2010, and before that, the last bridge crossing the Vltava was the Troja Footbridge, which had been in operation since July 1984.