The Iron Bridge in Arequipa, Peru. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times

The locals here call it the Iron Bridge, a narrow, graceful span across the Chili River with pale green garlic fields below and the cleft-topped Misti volcano rising above it in the distance. Travel books, tour guides and residents all proudly point to the bridge, a fluent expression of the Industrial Revolution, as the work of Gustave Eiffel, the 19th-century French engineer who built the Eiffel Tower and designed the iron skeleton inside the Statue of Liberty.

Except that it is not. And neither are a great many other bridges and buildings around Peruand the rest of South America that are popularly attributed to the famous Frenchman.

“Anything made of metal in South America, people say it is by Eiffel,” said Darci Gutiérrez, a professor of architecture in Arequipa, Peru’s second-largest city, who has spent years debunking what she calls the Eiffel myth.....Continue Reading

> via NYT