The Most Beautiful Bridges in the United States
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful bridges in the United States are Golden Gate Bridge, Bixby Creek Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge. The list covers 5 bridges. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The United States became a laboratory of bridge building in the century between the Civil War and the interstate era. Railways, cars and growing cities needed crossings over waters and gorges that earlier technology could not span, and engineers answered with steel-wire cables, long steel arches and slender reinforced concrete. The best of these bridges are now as familiar as any landmark in the country.
The Brooklyn Bridge, designed by John A. Roebling and finished under his son Washington and Emily Roebling in 1883, was the first to use steel-wire cables on such a scale. The Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937, frames the mouth of San Francisco Bay with Art Deco towers. Bixby Creek Bridge, built in 1932 on California's Highway 1, is a single open-spandrel concrete arch over a coastal canyon. The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia was the longest single-span steel arch in the world when it opened. The Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado is the country's highest bridge above its river.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Golden Gate Bridge | Bridge | |
| 2 | Bixby Creek Bridge | Bridge | |
| 3 | Brooklyn Bridge | Bridge | |
| 4 | New River Gorge Bridge | Bridge | |
| 5 | Royal Gorge Bridge | Bridge |
01 Golden Gate Bridge
United States · 8 km from San Francisco37.820° N 122.479° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The engineering behind the bridge has its own quieter injustice. Much of the mathematics that made the design possible — the calculations proving a suspension span this long could handle wind and its own weight — was done by engineer Charles Ellis, who spent over two years on the project before chief engineer Joseph Strauss fired him in 1931 and scrubbed his name from the official project report, apparently unwilling to share credit. Ellis went uncredited for decades; it wasn't until 2012, more than seventy years after the bridge opened, that a plaque acknowledging his work was finally installed on its south tower.
Did you know? For the 50th anniversary in 1987, around 300,000 people crowded onto the deck at once and the arch of the main span visibly flattened under their weight.
02 Bixby Creek Bridge
United States · 25.4 km from Monterey36.371° N 121.902° W
King of Hearts · CC BY-SA 3.0 The creek takes its name from Charles Henry Bixby, a businessman who came to California in 1852; for a time the structure was also called the Rainbow Bridge, after a resort upstream. The arch ribs thicken from about five feet at the deck to nine at their base, a detail visible if you look closely at how the curve gathers weight towards the rock. Nearly a century on, the bridge still carries the highway, and it has become one of the best-known images of the Big Sur coast.
Did you know? The work consumed about 600,000 pounds of reinforcing steel and 45,000 sacks of cement.
03 Brooklyn Bridge
United States · 1.8 km from New York City40.706° N 73.996° W
Image by laretalo from Pixabay The bridge's first brush with disaster came six days after opening, when a woman's scream on the crowded footpath triggered a stampede that killed twelve people, feeding rumors the structure was collapsing under the crowd's weight. P. T. Barnum offered the fix a year later: he marched 21 elephants, including his famous Jumbo, across the span in a publicity stunt designed to prove, once and for all, that the bridge could hold.
Did you know? A contractor, J. Lloyd Haigh, secretly supplied substandard wire; engineers compensated by adding 150 extra wires to each cable.
04 New River Gorge Bridge
United States · 33.2 km from Beckley38.069° N 81.082° W
Image by dafacct from Pixabay The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, before it was 50 years old, because of its engineering significance and its impact on local transport, and in 2005 it appeared on West Virginia's state quarter. It stands within New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, which became a national park in 2020, and the National Park Service visitor centre at its northern end has overlooks and a stairway partway down into the gorge. A narrow inspection catwalk runs under the roadway for the whole length of the bridge. Each year on the third Saturday of October the road is closed for Bridge Day, when BASE jumpers leap from the deck and climbers rappel down to the river.
Did you know? It was the largest project the West Virginia Department of Highways had ever undertaken, with the federal government paying 70 percent.
05 Royal Gorge Bridge
United States38.462° N 105.325° W
Image by Lexus_ from Pixabay The bridge belongs to Cañon City, the seat of Fremont County, a small town on the Arkansas River downstream of the canyon, which leases it to a park operator. In June 2013 a wildfire swept both rims of the gorge and destroyed 48 of the park's 52 buildings along with the aerial tram; the bridge itself lost only about a hundred deck planks. Far below, the tracks of the Royal Gorge Route Railroad follow the river along the canyon floor.
Did you know? A gravel businessman who bought the railway through the gorge in 1998 found he also owned the air rights where the bridge hangs.
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 the United States?
- On our list, Golden Gate Bridge ranks first, followed by Bixby Creek Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge.
- When did the Brooklyn Bridge open?
- It opened on 24 May 1883 after fourteen years of construction. Its main span of 1,595 feet was then the longest of any suspension bridge in the world.
- What kind of bridge is Bixby Creek Bridge?
- It is an open-spandrel reinforced concrete arch bridge completed in 1932 on the Big Sur coast, built to carry what became California State Route 1.
- What is Bridge Day at the New River Gorge?
- Bridge Day is an annual event in October when the New River Gorge Bridge is closed to traffic and BASE jumpers parachute from the deck into the gorge.
- How many bridges are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 bridges.