In Spain there are currently three geotechnical standards: Building Technical Code (2006), for application in the field of building construction; Guide of Foundations in Road Works (2003), for application in the field of road construction; and Geotechnical Recommendation for Design of Maritime & Harbour Works (2005), for application in the field of port construction. The approach to rock mechanics in these Spanish standards is reviewed in this paper, considering different geotechnical areas: site investigation, shallow and deep foundations and slopes. It will be shown that in some cases these standards have different ways of approaching these geotechnical problems that may give out to remarkable differences in the results obtained. This reflects the fact that there are many different empirical formulae and procedures, collected in standards all around the world. Evolution in EC-7 considering more relevant aspects of rock engineering will help to unify methods and criteria used, but the variety of possible existing approaches, some of them showed in this paper, stresses the actual difficulties for that unification.
There are some key aspects that make the mechanical behavior of rock masses, in general, much more complex than in most soils and therefore there are more difficulties in the application of standards to rock engineering design as it is being seen in Eurocode 7, EC-7 (Lamas et al, 2014).
In Spain there are currently three geotechnical standards, codes or guides, developed in different areas of civil engineering and construction:
Building Technical Code (Código Técnico de la Edificación
Guide of Foundations in Road Works (Guía de Cimentaciones para Obras de Carretera, GCC), for application in the field of road construction. Approved in 2003.
Geotechnical Recommendation for Design of Maritime & Harbour Works (Recomendaciones para Obras Marítimas, ROM 0.5–05), for application in the field of port construction. Approved in 2005 (previous version in 1994).
