The Most Beautiful Bridges in Germany
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful bridges in Germany are Göltzsch Viaduct, Krämerbrücke and Magdeburg Canal Bridge. The list covers 5 bridges. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Germany's bridges trace the country's history of trade and engineering. Medieval merchant towns built stone bridges lined with shops, the railway age demanded viaducts across deep valleys, and Romantic landowners and travellers added bridges meant to be looked at as much as crossed. The country's canals produced one of the most unusual crossings of all.
The Göltzsch Viaduct in Saxony, completed in 1851 for the railway, is the largest brick bridge in the world, with four tiers of arches across the valley. The Krämerbrücke in Erfurt, a stone bridge from 1325, is lined along its whole length with half-timbered houses and shops. The Magdeburg Water Bridge, opened in 2003, carries a canal and its ships over the Elbe. In Kromlau park, the Rakotz Bridge is a thin basalt arch that forms a full circle with its reflection in the lake. In Saxon Switzerland, the sandstone Bastei Bridge of 1851 spans a gorge between rock pillars high above the Elbe.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Göltzsch Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 2 | Krämerbrücke | Bridge | |
| 3 | Magdeburg Canal Bridge | Aqueduct | |
| 4 | Rakotz Bridge | Bridge | |
| 5 | Bastei Bridge | Bridge |
01 Göltzsch Viaduct
Göltzschtalbrücke
Germany · 30.2 km from Gera50.623° N 12.246° E
Image by LPArt from Pixabay What's genuinely remarkable is that the experiment worked permanently. Nearly 175 years after it opened, the viaduct is still in daily commercial use — up to fifty freight and passenger trains a day, some weighing as much as 2,000 tonnes, cross a structure of stacked nineteenth-century brick that has needed nothing more than routine maintenance to keep doing the job it was built for.
Did you know? When the valley floor proved softer than expected, chief engineer Robert Wilke replaced the planned row of equal arches in the middle with a single large central arch.
02 Krämerbrücke
Germany · 1 km from Erfurt50.979° N 11.031° E
Image by 995645 from Pixabay Erfurt, now the capital of Thuringia, grew rich at a crossroads of the Via Regia, the medieval trade and pilgrim route across Europe, and the bridge was part of that road. Over the centuries its stalls sold herbs and wine from the monasteries, then paper, silk, spices, goldsmiths' work and the blue dye woad that made the city's fortune. At its eastern end the bridge still passes through the arch of St Giles' Church, first mentioned in 1110; the matching church at the western end, St Benedict's, was demolished in the 19th century. Several houses were damaged in an air raid in 1945 and rebuilt in 1954, and the whole structure was thoroughly restored in 1985–86.
Did you know? Among the monasteries that kept stalls on the bridge was the Augustinian house where Martin Luther later lived as a monk.
03 Magdeburg Canal Bridge
Kanalbrücke Magdeburg
Germany · 12.3 km from Magdeburg52.230° N 11.696° E
Olivier Cleynen · CC BY 4.0 What makes it worth standing on the bank for is the plain strangeness of the sight: loaded cargo ships gliding through a channel of water suspended above a river, seemingly ignoring it, on a structure engineered purely so the river underneath becomes irrelevant to them. It's the same basic trick Telford pulled off in cast iron two centuries earlier in Wales, scaled up with modern concrete and steel to carry vessels far larger than any narrowboat.
Did you know? The 1930s remains were blasted away, and their 53,000 cubic metres of rubble were reused as a base for the new construction site.
04 Rakotz Bridge
Rakotzbrücke
Germany · 33.8 km from Cottbus51.536° N 14.640° E
Image by herbert2512 from Pixabay The bridge is the star of the 80-hectare Kromlau Azalea and Rhododendron Park, but not its only folly: the park has other bridges, ponds and lakes, and a Kavalierhaus. The best time to come is late spring, when the rhododendrons and azaleas are in flower, and the best light for the circle is a windless morning, when the surface of the lake is still. Autumn colour gives a second season.
Did you know? The thin basalt columns standing in the lake beside the bridge are known as the Organ.
05 Bastei Bridge
Basteibrücke
Germany · 33.3 km from Ústí nad Labem50.962° N 14.072° E
Image by OrcaTec from Pixabay This is where the Romantic image of Saxon Switzerland was born. Visitors came from the 1790s onward, walking the Painters' Way (Malerweg) from Wehlen and Lohmen, and a butcher from Lohmen was already selling bread, beer and coffee from huts here by 1812. Caspar David Friedrich and Ludwig Richter drew these rocks, Goethe's son August wrote in 1819 of a view beyond words, and in 1853 the Saxon court photographer Hermann Krone took what are counted among the first landscape photographs in Germany at the Bastei Bridge; tablets on the rock pinnacle called the Jahrhundertturm remember him and the pioneers of local tourism. The long-distance Eisenach to Budapest trail still passes over the bridge.
Did you know? Stone balls fired by medieval catapults have been found at Neurathen Castle, and a reconstructed stone-thrower has stood there since 1986.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful bridges in Germany?
- On our list, Göltzsch Viaduct ranks first, followed by Krämerbrücke and Magdeburg Canal Bridge.
- Why is the Rakotz Bridge called a Devil's Bridge?
- Like many medieval-looking arch bridges, it carries the popular name Devil's Bridge, from the legend that such daring arches could only be built with the devil's help. It was in fact built in the 1860s as a feature of a landscape park.
- What is the Magdeburg Water Bridge?
- It is a navigable aqueduct opened in 2003 that carries the Elbe–Havel Canal over the river Elbe, so barges can cross the river without locks. At 918 metres it is the longest canal bridge in Europe.
- How many bridges are on this list in Germany?
- The list covers 5 bridges.