British national, Lewis Stevenson, 26, tried to scale the 630ft Castilla-La Mancha Bridge in Talavera de la Reina — the tallest bridge in Spain. He met an untimely death in the process.
Tributes have been paid to the British national who died after falling more than 600ft off the bridge in Spain while creating social media content.
Stevenson would scale the structures without a harness in a high-risk sport known as rooftopping.
Photos on his social media accounts show him sitting on top of a New York skyscraper, a beam overlooking London and a hotel roof in Mexico City.
Rooftoppers climb to the top of tall structures, often without permission or safety gear. Enthusiasts document their experiences on social media, often gaining thousands of followers in the process.
However, as with any high-risk activity, rooftopping comes with significant dangers – including falls, accidents, and legal consequences, as many rooftoppers trespass on private property.
Due to the underground nature of rooftopping, there are no firm statistics on deaths associated with it. However, notable deaths include popular rooftopper Wu Yongning from China, who fell to his death in 2017 while hanging from the top of a skyscraper during a live broadcast.
Tragically, it emerged that his family had tried to talk him out of scaling the bridge, but he’d believed he ‘would be alright’.
His grandfather, Clifford Stevenson, from Derby, told MailOnline: “We all tried to talk him out of it. We were always trying to talk him out of doing things but that was the way he was.
“He loved doing it – he always went out there believing he’d be alright. He did what he did for his own pleasure. He did not get any money for it, he was an adventurer.”
Macarena Munoz, the Spanish city’s councillor for citizen security, said Stevenson was joined by a 24-year-old Briton, who is unnamed, and that the pair had visited the bridge to create social media content.
In a statement, she said: “We have been able to find out, they had come to Talavera to climb the bridge and create content for social networks, which has resulted in this unfortunate and sad outcome.”
She added attempting to climb the bridge “is totally prohibited and which we have reiterated on many occasions cannot be done under any circumstances”.
The man’s body has been removed and taken to a funeral home by a coroner, according to a press release from the local council.
The Castilla-La Mancha cable-stayed bridge in Talavera is an engineering work that crosses the Tagus River and connects the two banks of the city. It is 318 meters long and 192 meters high, making it the highest cable-stayed bridge in Spain and the third in Europe.
Its design is modern and elegant, with two leaning towers that support the deck by means of 58 steel cables. The bridge was inaugurated in 2016 and has become a symbol of Talavera and the region.
The structure features 152 wire ropes which are attached to the main concrete towers creating a fan-like shape.
A spokesperson from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said: “We are supporting the family of a British man who has died in Spain and are in contact with the local authorities.”
