The Most Beautiful Bridges in the World

63 places in 31 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Aqueduct of Segovia

   Acueducto de Segovia

   Spain40.948° N 4.118° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. At Plaza del Azoguejo its double tier of granite arches climbs to about 28.5 m above the street, and people pass beneath arches that have carried water, or at least the channel for it, since the Roman period. The whole elevated bridge runs for roughly 728 m and has 167 arches, and the blocks are laid entirely without mortar, held in place by their own weight and careful cutting. It is the emblem of the city and appears on its coat of arms.

   Did you know? According to legend, a water-carrier girl struck a pact with the devil, who built the aqueduct in one night but was beaten by dawn before laying the final stone.

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2. 02 Széchenyi Chain Bridge

   Hungary · 2.9 km from Budapest47.499° N 19.044° E

   

   Before 1849 Buda and Pest faced each other across the Danube with no permanent crossing. The Chain Bridge changed that. Count István Széchenyi championed the project, the English engineer William Tierney Clark designed it in 1839, and the Scottish engineer Adam Clark — no relation — supervised the work on site; the ironwork was made in Britain and shipped out in sections. When it opened in 1849, in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, its 202 m central span was among the longest in the world, and it was the first permanent bridge across the Danube anywhere in Hungary.

   Did you know? In 1849 Austrian troops tried to blow up the new bridge; Adam Clark had flooded the chain chambers, and the charge left on the deck did little damage.

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3. 03 Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

   United Kingdom · 27.1 km from Chester52.970° N 3.088° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Thomas Telford did something no engineer had dared before: instead of a stone trough lined with clay — the only way anyone had carried a canal across a valley until then — he cast the whole watertight channel out of iron plates, 3.7 metres wide and 1.7 metres deep, and hung it 38 metres above the River Dee on eighteen hollow stone piers that taper toward the top to shed weight. He'd tested the idea on a smaller scale at Longdon-on-Tern first, then bet the Ellesmere Canal Company's money on it here. Sealing the iron joints was its own invention: the joints between the iron plates were packed with Welsh flannel soaked in a white-lead paste, then bolted tight — homely materials for a structure of such daring.

   Did you know? The mortar of the stone piers was mixed from lime, water and ox blood.

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4. 04 Ponte Sant'Angelo

   Ponte Sant’Angelo

   Italy · 1.3 km from Rome41.902° N 12.466° E

   

   Ponte Sant'Angelo crosses the Tiber in the heart of Rome, leading straight to the massive drum of Castel Sant'Angelo. Emperor Hadrian built it in 134 AD as the Pons Aelius, the approach to his own mausoleum — the drum that later became a papal fortress and gave the bridge its present name. Three of its five arches are still Roman; the other two replaced the ancient ramps when the Tiber embankments were built in the late nineteenth century.

   Did you know? During the jubilee of 1300 the crowds were so great that pilgrims crossed the bridge in two separate streams, a scene Dante recalls in the Inferno.

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5. 05 Chapel Bridge

   Kappelbrücke

   Switzerland · 2.1 km from Lucerne47.052° N 8.308° E

   

   For most of its life, the point of the bridge was the paintings hanging under its roof, not the crossing itself. Beginning in 1611, the covered timber structure was fitted with a running gallery of panels depicting scenes from Swiss history and the legends of Lucerne's patron saints, Leger and Maurice — a visual civic history lesson, painted during a period when the Counter-Reformation gave Catholic cities like Lucerne good reason to advertise their saints prominently.

   Did you know? It is considered the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe and the oldest surviving truss bridge anywhere in the world.

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6. 06 Göltzsch Viaduct

   Göltzschtalbrücke

   Germany · 30.2 km from Gera50.623° N 12.246° E

   

   The Göltzsch Viaduct is a bridge built almost entirely out of small clay bricks — 26,021,000 of them, laid by hand between 1846 and 1851 — because the valley it crosses happened to sit on abundant loam deposits, and hauling in cut stone would have been slower and far more expensive than firing bricks on-site. That local-materials logic produced something that briefly held the record for the tallest railway bridge on Earth, and still holds the record, unchallenged, for the largest brick-built bridge in the world: 574 metres long, 78 metres high, narrowing from 23 metres wide at its base to just 9 metres at the top, carried across four stacked tiers of 98 arched vaults. Granite was reserved only for the structural points under the greatest stress; everything else the eye actually sees is brick.

   Did you know? An 1845 design competition drew 81 entries, but none could prove it would carry trains and none was built; one even proposed a prison inside the bridge.

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7. 07 Pont Saint-Bénézet

   Pont d'Avignon

   France · 39 km from Nîmes43.954° N 4.805° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The bridge in the nursery song ends in mid-river. Four stone arches leave the Avignon bank of the Rhône and simply stop, with a small chapel perched on one of the piers and the far shore out of reach. What remains is a fragment of a crossing that once ran for about 900 metres to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

   Did you know? Bénézet died before the first bridge was finished and was buried in the chapel on the bridge; his relics were moved away only in 1670.

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8. 08 The Helix Bridge

   Singapore · 1.1 km from Singapore1.288° N 103.861° E

   

   A walkway wrapped in two spiralling ribbons of stainless steel curves across the mouth of Marina Bay, and from a distance it reads less like a bridge than a strand of DNA laid on its side. The Helix, as it is officially called, carries only pedestrians, linking Marina Centre on the north shore with Marina South and the resorts beside Marina Bay Sands. It is about 280 metres long, and the twin coils that enclose the deck are both decoration and structure: they hold the bridge up.

   Did you know? It was promoted as the world's first footbridge built in the form of a double helix.

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9. 09 Golden Gate Bridge

   United States · 8 km from San Francisco37.820° N 122.479° W

   

   The bridge's color exists because nobody could agree on one. The steel arrived from the fabricators already coated in a burnt-orange sealant primer meant only to protect it from rust during shipping and assembly. The US Navy, worried about ships colliding with it in fog, wanted it painted black with yellow stripes; the Army Air Corps wanted red-and-white candy-cane bands for aircraft visibility. Consulting architect Irving Morrow looked at the primer against the fog and the water and argued to keep it, insisting the warm color read better in mist than gray or black ever would. The bridge authority agreed, gave the shade the official name International Orange, and it has been repainted in the same color ever since — not, as often assumed, continuously, but through a rolling touch-up program.

   Did you know? In 2020 new railing slats began making the bridge hum in strong winds; one analysis found the tones match the notes F, G, A and B.

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10. 10 Bridge of Peace

    Georgia · 4.1 km from Tbilisi41.693° N 44.808° E

    

    Michele De Lucchi's 2010 footbridge over the Kura River was engineered less as a crossing than as a light installation you happen to walk through. Its steel skeleton, curved like a wave or a shell, is wrapped in a glass canopy fitted with 1,208 individually controlled LED units, plus motion-triggered LED strips built into the handrails that light up as pedestrians pass — 240 sensors track people crossing and respond to them directly rather than running on a fixed loop. Once an hour, lights along both parapets spell out a message in Morse code that ticks through the periodic table of elements, a design touch few visitors notice unless they happen to be standing there watching for it.

    Did you know? The steel structure was manufactured in Italy and brought to Tbilisi in about 200 trucks, then assembled over the river on site.

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11. 11 Forth Bridge

    United Kingdom · 11.9 km from Edinburgh55.998° N 3.388° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    When the Tay Bridge blew down in 1879 with a train on it, work stopped on its designer's planned suspension bridge over the Firth of Forth. The engineers who replaced him, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, set out to build something that could never be accused of flimsiness. The result, opened in March 1890, is the Forth Bridge: a railway viaduct 2.5 km long whose three great cantilever towers, each 110 metres high on granite piers, carry the double track 46 metres above high water. Its two main spans of about 520 metres were the longest in the world until 1919 and are still the second-longest of any cantilever bridge.

    Did you know? The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, opened the bridge on 4 March 1890 by driving home a final rivet that was gold-plated and inscribed.

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12. 12 Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge

    Bosnia and Herzegovina43.782° N 19.288° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The bridge at Višegrad carries eleven stone arches across the green Drina in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is one of the masterpieces of Ottoman engineering. It was commissioned by Mehmed Paša Sokolović, grand vizier to three sultans, who was born in this region, and designed by the court architect Mimar Sinan; construction ran from 1571 to 1577. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2007.

    Did you know? The bridge carried the main road between Bosnia and Constantinople, the route known as the Tsarigrad road.

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13. 13 The Iron Bridge

    United Kingdom52.627° N 2.485° W

    

    At first sight the Iron Bridge is smaller and more delicate than its reputation: a single semicircular arch of openwork iron, a little over 30 metres across, leaping the River Severn in a steep wooded gorge in Shropshire. Its importance is out of all proportion to its size. Opened to traffic on 1 January 1781, it was the first major bridge anywhere built of cast iron, and it proved that iron could carry a structure that had always been made of stone or timber. The gorge around it, where coal, iron ore, limestone and fireclay lay close to the surface, was one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution: at nearby Coalbrookdale, in 1709, Abraham Darby I had first smelted local iron ore with coke.

    Did you know? Forensic paint analysis during the 2017–2018 restoration showed the bridge was originally red-brown, so it was repainted from its long-familiar blue-grey back to that colour.

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14. 14 Rialto Bridge

    Ponte di Rialto

    Italy · 0.1 km from Venice45.438° N 12.336° E

    

    The Rialto Bridge crosses the Grand Canal in a single stone arch, with a covered arcade at its crown and rows of shops climbing both ramps: a bridge that is also a street. Linking the San Marco and San Polo districts, it is the oldest of the four bridges over the Grand Canal, and until the Accademia bridge opened in the 19th century it was the only fixed crossing of Venice's main waterway for two and a half centuries.

    Did you know? The stone bridge rests on about 12,000 elm-wood piles topped with a layer of heavy larch planks.

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15. 15 Pont Neuf

    France · 0.8 km from Paris48.858° N 2.342° E

    

    The name means "New Bridge", yet this is the oldest standing bridge across the Seine in Paris. Its first stone went down on 31 May 1578 under Henri III, and after long interruptions during the Wars of Religion the crossing was finished in 1606 and opened the following year under Henri IV. The design is credited to Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau and Guillaume Marchand. It strides over the western tip of the Île de la Cité in two uneven halves: seven arches link the island to the Right Bank and five to the Left, for a total length of about 232 metres and a width of 22.

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16. 16 Sydney Harbour Bridge

    Australia · 2.1 km from Sydney33.852° S 151.211° E

    

    Sydney Harbour is deep enough that no one could sink temporary piers out into the water to support the arch while it was being built. Engineers under Dr John Bradfield solved it by building outward from each shore at once, anchoring huge steel cables into the rock on both banks to hold the two half-arches up by tension as they crept toward each other over the water, joining in the middle in August 1930 with the whole structure still unsupported from below. It remains one of the more nerve-wracking cantilever builds of its era — sixteen construction workers died over the eight years it took.

    Did you know? The four granite-faced pylons carry no load at all; they were added mainly to give the arch a visual frame.

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17. 17 Charles Bridge

    Czech Republic · 0.8 km from Prague50.086° N 14.412° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The most-repeated story about Charles Bridge is that its mortar was strengthened with eggs, shipped in from towns and villages across Bohemia on the emperor's order. One town, Velvary, is still ribbed for having sent its eggs hard-boiled — the story goes that villagers, worried about breakage on the cart ride to Prague, cooked them first, and paid for the blunder in centuries of local jokes and a festival that reenacts it to this day. Lab tests have gone back and forth: a chemistry institute once reported egg proteins in samples of the old mortar, while a 2010 re-examination by Charles University found no organic traces at all, concluding the binder was simply a well-made hydraulic lime akin to Roman concrete. The truth is probably less delicious than the legend, though eggs, milk and animal blood really were common medieval mortar additives elsewhere.

    Did you know? Until 1870 the bridge was simply called the Stone Bridge or the Prague Bridge; it only took Charles IV's name in the 19th century.

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18. 18 Stari Most

    Bosnia and Herzegovina · 1.5 km from Mostar43.337° N 17.815° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Old Bridge of Mostar, Stari Most, springs across the green Neretva in a single, steeply humped stone arch about 30 m long and 4 m wide, some 24 m above the summer water. It is the heart and the name of the city: the Mostari were the bridge-keepers who guarded it, and two fortified towers, Halebija on the north-east bank and Tara on the south-west, still stand at either end. Ottoman sources describe the wooden suspension bridge it replaced as swaying so badly that people crossed it in mortal fear.

    Did you know? More than 60 shells struck the bridge before it finally gave way and fell into the Neretva in November 1993.

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19. 19 Krämerbrücke

    Germany · 1 km from Erfurt50.979° N 11.031° E

    

    Few streets in Europe run over a river without anyone noticing, but the Krämerbrücke in Erfurt does exactly that. Walk along its cobbles and you see only a narrow lane between half-timbered houses with shop windows, house signs and old doors; the six stone arches carrying it all over the Breitstrom, an arm of the Gera, are visible only from the riverbank. It is one of the very few bridges anywhere still lined with inhabited buildings, and it has been lived on for more than five centuries, longer than any other bridge in Europe.

    Did you know? Its two rows of half-timbered houses are the longest continuous rows of inhabited buildings on any bridge in Europe.

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20. 20 Magdeburg Canal Bridge

    Kanalbrücke Magdeburg

    Germany · 12.3 km from Magdeburg52.230° N 11.696° E

    

    The idea of joining the Mittellandkanal and the Elbe-Havel Canal directly over the Elbe River goes back to 1919, and by 1938 the anchor points and the Rothensee boat lift next to it were already built — then the Second World War stopped everything, and the divided, communist East German government afterward had no reason to finish a project designed to speed trade with the West. It sat half-built for roughly sixty years, a Cold War casualty nobody had the money or the incentive to complete.

    Did you know? At 918 metres, it is the longest canal bridge in Europe, with about 690 metres crossing the floodplain and 228 metres spanning the river itself.

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21. 21 Tower Bridge

    United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.506° N 0.075° W

    

    Tower Bridge was the answer to a very Victorian problem: how to join the fast-growing East End to the south bank without cutting off the ships that still unloaded in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and the Tower. A conventional fixed bridge at street level would have blocked their masts. After more than fifty designs had been rejected, the City chose a bascule bridge, and Parliament authorised it in 1885 on the condition, among others, that it should harmonise with the Tower of London next door. The architect was the City Architect, Horace Jones, and the engineer John Wolfe Barry. Construction began in 1886 and took eight years; the bridge was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales on 30 June 1894.

    Did you know? In 1952 a double-decker bus was caught on the bridge as it began to open, and the driver accelerated across the widening gap, earning a ten-pound bonus.

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22. 22 Ponte Vecchio

    Italy · 1.4 km from Florence43.768° N 11.253° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The bridge standing today isn't the original, or even the second. A Roman-era crossing at this narrowest point of the Arno was destroyed and rebuilt more than once, wiped out again by a flood in 1117, rebuilt, then destroyed once more in the catastrophic flood of 1333. The version tourists cross now was finished in 1345, engineered with unusually flat, wide segmental arches for its era specifically so future floodwater and debris would pass beneath more easily than through the narrower medieval arches that had failed before.

    Did you know? A bridge at this spot is first mentioned in documents as early as 996.

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23. 23 Khaju Bridge

    Iran · 7.4 km from Isfahan32.637° N 51.683° E

    

    Khaju Bridge is the most refined of the historic bridges of Isfahan, the Safavid city on the Zayanderud. It was built around 1650 under Shah Abbas II, and it is at once a bridge and a weir: roughly 133 metres long and 12 metres wide, it rests on a low platform of stone with sluice gates between its piers, which could be closed to hold back the river and raise the water level upstream. On the downstream side the platform steps down in broad stone terraces, so when the river runs the water spills over them in a wide, shallow cascade.

    Did you know? Shah Abbas II's builders raised the bridge on the foundations of an earlier crossing.

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24. 24 Les Ferreres Aqueduct

    Acueducto de les Ferreres

    Spain · 2.8 km from Tarragona41.146° N 1.244° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Ferreres Aqueduct, better known locally as the Pont del Diable, the Devil's Bridge, is the most spectacular surviving piece of the water supply that fed Roman Tarraco, the capital of the province of Hispania Tarraconensis and today's Tarragona. It carried water taken from the Francolí river about 15 km north of the city, and it probably dates from the reign of Augustus. Along with the rest of Tarraco's Roman remains, it is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Archaeological Ensemble of Tarraco, inscribed in 2000.

    Did you know? According to legend, the devil built the bridge in exchange for the soul of the first to drink its water, and a donkey was made to drink first.

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25. 25 Kintai Bridge

    Japan · 34.5 km from Hiroshima34.168° N 132.178° E

    

    Kintai Bridge crosses the Nishiki River at Iwakuni in five tall timber arches, each rising and falling like a drumbeat, and seen from the bank the whole line has the rhythm of a ribbon laid on the water, which is close to what its name, "brocade sash", suggests. It was the answer to a stubborn problem. The river is about 200 metres wide here with a bed of deep, shifting sand, and the wooden bridges that the Kikkawa lords of Iwakuni built below their castle kept washing away. The third lord, Kikkawa Hiroyoshi, first sent his carpenter Kodama Kurōemon to study the famous cantilevered Saruhashi bridge in Kai Province, but that design works over a ravine of 30 metres, not a river of 200.

    Did you know? Studies of the 2001–2004 rebuild showed the arches follow a curve close to a catenary, and the full logic of the old design method was only worked out in 2023.

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26. 26 Bixby Creek Bridge

    United States · 25.4 km from Monterey36.371° N 121.902° W

    

    Bixby Creek Bridge carries California's Highway 1 across a deep coastal canyon on the Big Sur coast, and it is the rare road bridge that improves the landscape it crosses. A single reinforced-concrete arch, 360 feet across, springs from the canyon walls and holds the deck some 280 feet above the creek; slender open spandrel columns rise from the arch to the roadway, so the structure reads as a pale, almost weightless curve between dark cliffs, with the creek running out to the Pacific below. Set against the cliffs and the ocean, it looks less like infrastructure than part of the coast.

    Did you know? Building the arch required a timber falsework about 250 feet high, made from more than 300,000 board feet of Douglas fir.

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27. 27 Pont Alexandre III

    Pont Alexandre-III

    France · 3 km from Paris48.864° N 2.314° E

    

    Paris has older bridges and longer ones, but none so openly theatrical. The Pont Alexandre III crosses the Seine in a single low steel arch between the Invalides on the left bank and the Grand Palais and Petit Palais on the right, and it was built as a piece of diplomacy in metal and gilt. Tsar Nicholas II laid the foundation stone in October 1896, a gesture sealing the new Franco-Russian alliance, and the bridge, named after his father, opened for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 together with the two exhibition palaces beside it.

    Did you know? The single steel arch spans 107.5 metres and is built from 15 ribs, each assembled from 32 cast-steel segments.

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28. 28 Brooklyn Bridge

    United States · 1.8 km from New York City40.706° N 73.996° W

    

    The man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge never saw a single cable strung. In June 1869, while surveying the site, John Roebling had his foot crushed against a piling by an approaching ferry. He refused amputation, treated the wound himself with a water cure of his own devising, and died of tetanus three weeks later — leaving the project to his 32-year-old son, Washington, before construction had properly begun.

    Did you know? Its main span of about 486 metres made it the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1883.

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29. 29 Menai Suspension Bridge

    United Kingdom53.220° N 4.163° W

    

    When Thomas Telford's bridge opened across the Menai Strait on 30 January 1826, its central span of about 176 metres was longer than any other bridge in the world. Two towers of pale Penmon limestone carry sixteen chains over a fast tidal channel, holding the deck around thirty metres above high water, a height set so that the tall sailing ships of the day could pass beneath under full rig. Seen from the shore or from the water, the slender deck and the long sag of the chains still look astonishingly light for something built in the age of horse-drawn coaches.

    Did you know? When it opened in 1826, the bridge had the longest clear span of any bridge in the world, about 176 m.

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30. 30 Clifton Suspension Bridge

    United Kingdom · 3.1 km from Bristol51.455° N 2.628° W

    

    The Clifton Suspension Bridge hangs across the Avon Gorge at its narrowest point, 245 feet above the river at high water, joining Clifton, on the Bristol side, to Leigh Woods in North Somerset. The bridge, a single span of just over 700 feet between two stone towers, sits across it with the lightness of a drawn line. It is the emblem of Bristol, and it is also a monument to its first designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who won the commission and did not live to see it finished.

    Did you know? In 2002 engineers found twelve vaulted chambers hidden inside the Leigh Woods abutment, some of them about 35 feet high.

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