A park in the middle of San Antonio now has a bridge built for people and wildlife to share, and it sits at the centre of a project that started with one of the city’s last undeveloped tracts.

Phil Hardberger Park is a park and nature preserve named after former San Antonio mayor Phil Hardberger, who pushed for parks in the city’s urban core. During his time as mayor, Hardberger created a nature preserve at Voelcker Ranch, one of the few remaining undeveloped parcels in the city.

The city bought 311 acres, a figure that has since grown to 330 acres, to create a park and conservation site in a densely developed area. The park officially opened in 2010.

“With Phil Hardberger Park, we are creating a park not just for ourselves and our children, but for the centuries,” Harberger, now president of the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy, said.

Ten years later, the conservancy opened the Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge, described as the first such land bridge in the country designed for both human and wildlife passage. The bridge is 150 feet wide and crosses a six-lane highway, linking the two sides of the park that were split by the road.

The park also includes a 1,000-foot elevated sky walk that begins at the base of the park and winds upward until pedestrians are among the tops of trees. Its entry points extend deeper into the park with increasingly elevated walkways designed to stay accessible to all visitors.

“You can have either a squirrel’s eye view or a bird’s eye view as you come up through the trees,” Hardberger told Texas Public Radio.

Designers built the bridge in layers, using a steep berm and native plantings to guide wildlife onto a separate trail from humans. Wildlife biologists also helped create the passage with 3,300 feet of barrier fencing that directs animals upward, where berms and plantings separate them from the human walkway.

According to Texas Public Radio, the bridge has diversified park habitat with more than 50 reintroduced wildlife species, restoring a “major ecological sanctuary.”

“Before the first anniversary of the bridge, every mammal species known to reside within the park was captured on the land bridge’s trail cameras,” a statement from the conservancy explained, “including bobcat, white-tailed deer, and ringtail cat.”

Next to the bridge, a 1-acre wetland collects rainwater and serves as a wildlife watering hole. A 250,000-gallon underground cistern stores rainwater and irrigates the land during standard San Antonio droughts.

Last year, the land bridge won the Honor Award for General Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

“A great case study in possibilities,” the awards jury wrote. “This project makes an incredibly difficult task of building a functional landscape on structure; creating a welcoming space over a highway; balancing the needs of humans and non-humans alike; and connecting ecological fragments look easy.”

The jury also called the bridge “more than infrastructure,” describing it as a “continuation of the land itself,” allowing restored scrubland and savanna to “unfold over a cityscape.”

The bridge cost about $23 million to build, funded through a 2017 voter-approved city bond of $13 million and another $10 million in grants and donations. The conservancy says it now draws about 750 to 1,000 visitors a day.

“Connectivity is an extremely important part of ecology,” Gregory Tuzzolo, an associate principal at Stimson Studio, the landscape architecture firm that worked on the bridge, told The Guardian. “You can make a conservation area over here and a park over there, but if wildlife can’t pass from one area to another, we still have a degraded landscape. So, being able to really have this signature piece and this park means so much to this landscape.”

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