In this Ph. D. thesis a variety of optical devices able to measure several physical magnitudes for application in the civil construction field are presented. These optical sensors are able to measure strain, temperature and pH variations in civil structures such as bridges, tunnels or even dikes in order to perform a structural health monitoring of that structures. Thus, strain and temperature sensors based on FBGs developed and tested in the Optical and Quantum Communications Group (GCOC) belonging to the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM) are presented and real application of these sensors in the construction process of an incrementally launched bridge for the metropolitan highway in Bilbao (Spain) is showed. Moreover, two pH optical sensors based on hydrogels employing two different techniques are presented. One of them is based on the optical intensity and the other one is based on the frequency properties of the resonances created by an in-fiber Fabry-Pérot cavity. In order to achieve an autonomous, remote and programmable monitoring system, a photovoltaic power supply system is designed and acquisition software capable of saving data in programmed time periods with alarm feature whenever the measurements exceed a defined threshold is developed. In addition, a novel monitoring system for optical sensors based on the correlation of optical pulses is also presented. This kind of system performs integrated measurements offering the possibility of divide the whole monitoring area into smaller regions employing partial reflectors. Two types of partial reflectors are explained; the wavelength selective reflectors and the partial intensity reflectors, and laboratory tests are carried out in order to obtain the calibrated response using both technologies. Finally, a waveguide temperature sensor based on the photoluminescence properties of colloidal quantum dots embedded in a PMMA matrix is presented. In order to fabricate the quantum dots, different materials are used, obtaining different sensitivities one from each other.