The International Federation of Consulting Engineers – FIDIC, based in Geneva, founded in 1913, has celebrated its 100th anniversary and as such instituted the Centennial Award in order to recognize the Best Engineering Projects that have stood out for their technical excellence, innovation, sustainability, and that have also gained international recognition.

The award ceremony was held at the gala dinner of the Centennial Congress held in the city of Barcelona. Previously, the projects that had been nominated for major engineering project categories were announced.

The project called “Design of the Master Plan for the Mass Transportation System of Lima and Callao” was the only engineering project in South America that reached the nomination for the FIDIC Centennial Award, recognizing in it not only its professional technical quality, and the great impact generated in the population of both cities, which despite their characteristics of mega-city, their public transport was totally deficient, having taken several decades of years without developing modern mass transport, reaching their population uselessly losing more than four million man-hours per day to move.

FIDIC recognized in this nomination the effort of the private company CESEL S.A., which, on its own initiative, decided to carry out the studies that would define the Lima and Callao Metro Network consisting of 5 lines with an extension of 144 kilometers, said network interacting with all the modes of public and private transportation so that they operate simultaneously efficiently, permanently updating their studies since 1997, and later in 2010 donating them to the Peruvian State, which in turn adopted them and promulgated D.S. 059-2010-MTC, which established the Lima and Callao Metro Basic Network for the first time and ordered its execution.

In this important nomination, FIDIC has praised the efforts of Peruvian engineers to provide the capital city of Peru with an efficient mass rapid transportation system that not only alleviates the daily effort of its inhabitants to get around, but also guarantees sustainability and growth. of the city by allowing citizens to move efficiently and economically between their homes and their workplace.

Even though it did not finally obtain the Centennial Award because it is essentially a project under construction that has not yet been completed, nevertheless, said nomination, unique in South America, constitutes a great honor for Peruvian engineering, having been considered jointly with such important projects as the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Plant in China, the Tunnel under the English Channel (between France and England), the works of the South Delta (in the Netherlands), the Hoover Dam (in the United States), among others of that importance for humanity.