In recent years, many geotechnical specialists must confront the need of accomplishing difficult
designing tasks under very restricted budgets (tasks such as the design of complex foundations, avoiding
slope movements, the development of earth containing structures, evaluating and repairing settlements, etc.).
This implies that soil in-situ probing and lab testing may be quite limited on many occasions. Therefore, it
usually falls on the specialists the responsibility of optimizing the resources at hand to fully characterize the
morphological and mechanical soil qualities, gaining the best safety factors as possible in the process. In order
to illustrate this challenging duty of optimization of the problem of quality soil characterization vs. probing
budget, some of the latest and most interesting of the authors’ experiences in the Spanish Plateau of Castile
will be covered.
