The English should be "A long time ago, there was a bridge here." The other languages suggest that the bridge no longer exists.

If I'm not mistaken, the English sentence is a translation of the Spanish one. You should thus place your comment under the English sentence.

My Spanish is bad. Can the sentence not be interpreted as meaning the current English translation? Don't forget that the other languages are irrelevant. Only direct translations are important for the sentence.

I don't think the other languages are irrelevant; they all need to mean the same thing. In any case, "Hace mucho tiempo aquí había un puente" uses "había", meaning, "A long time ago there was a bridge here." I'm not a native speaker so I could be wrong but I don't think so. The Spanish suggests the bridge is no longer there.

What I meant is, you're always only translating ONE sentence. So while translating a sentence, you just look at that one sentence and the other sentences are irrelevant. So if someone produced an ambiguous translation, say someone translates "He plays." as "Juga.", then the next one could translate the Spanish sentence into German as "Sie spielt." (she plays) and voilà: the English and German sentences don't mean the same thing anymore. That's legal on Tatoeba. :)

Maybe something similar happened between Spanish and English. I'm a much worse speaker of Spanish. I just thought that "hace mucho tiempo" might mean two things: a long time ago / for a long time. I don't know.
Well, a native speaker of Spanish should tell us.

Vortarulo:
Hace mucho tiempo = a long time ago,
durante mucho tiempo = for a long time :P

So I agree with dpr19, this sentence means that the bridge is no longer there; the English sentence should be either unlinked or changed.

I'd say the second one is a good translation of this sentence.