José Manuel de Sousa e Faria Nobre de Carvalho served as Governor of Macau from 25 November 1966 to 19 November 1974. The bridge was his signature project, and his tenure ended within weeks of its completion — he left office having physically connected the colony's peninsula to its southern islands for the first time by road. The structure he commissioned is 2,436 metres long after a later rearrangement of the shoreline shortened it slightly from its original length. It was built as a toll bridge, but the toll was dropped in 1982 when traffic volume made collection impractical. The bridge does not belong to the governor's era anymore — it belongs to the city it helped create.

The bridge's architectural concept is explicitly symbolic. Seen from above or from a distance, the span takes on the silhouette of a dragon — the Casino Lisboa tower at the Macau Peninsula end represents the creature's head, while the Taipa Monument on Taipa Pequena serves as the tail. Dragons carry weight in Cantonese cultural tradition: they bring fortune, they connect land and water, they are associated with the energy that animates a place. Building a bridge in dragon form across a harbor in a gambling city was not subtle, but it was intentional. The structural shape, which from certain angles resembles a flat triangle, reinforces the profile from a distance.

The bridge carried everything Macau needed to move between the peninsula and Taipa for decades — vehicles, goods, people, and the casino economy that was already beginning its transformation of the islands. A second bridge, the Friendship Bridge, opened in 1994; a third, the Sai Van Bridge, followed in 2004. With three crossings available, traffic management changed: by 2006, the Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge had been restricted to buses, taxis, and emergency vehicles, preserving its function while reducing congestion. The bridge marked its fiftieth anniversary in October 2024. That same year, a Hong Kong-registered fishing vessel struck its protective rail — the boat sank, though the crew were rescued by the Macau Customs Service, and the bridge itself sustained only minor damage.

Macau today looks almost nothing like the Macau of 1974. The casino boom of the 2000s and 2010s transformed Taipa and the reclaimed land of Cotai into a landscape of resort towers, convention centers, and gaming floors that dwarf anything that existed when the bridge was built. The Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge now sits in the shadow of all that development, a modest 1970s span linking a crowded peninsula to an island that has become one of the world's most intense concentrations of gaming revenue. "The Old Bridge" earned its nickname honestly. It was the first, and for twenty years it was the only. The dragon's head still points toward Casino Lisboa; the tail still points toward Taipa. The creature has not moved.