The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Bridges in Europe
11 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed bridges in Europe are Aqueduct of Segovia (Spain), Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (United Kingdom) and Pont Saint-Bénézet (France). The list covers 11 UNESCO-listed bridges in 7 countries. Spain has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aqueduct of Segovia | Aqueduct | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Pontcysyllte Aqueduct | Aqueduct | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 3 | Pont Saint-Bénézet | Bridge | France | ✓ |
| 4 | Forth Bridge | Bridge | United Kingdom | ✓ |
| 5 | Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge | Bridge | Bosnia and Herzegovina | ✓ |
| 6 | Charles Bridge | Bridge | Czech Republic | ✓ |
| 7 | Stari Most | Bridge | Bosnia and Herzegovina | ✓ |
| 8 | Ponte Vecchio | Bridge | Italy | ✓ |
| 9 | Les Ferreres Aqueduct | Aqueduct | Spain | ✓ |
| 10 | Vizcaya Bridge | Transporter bridge | Spain | ✓ |
| 11 | Luiz I Bridge | Bridge | Portugal | ✓ |
01 Aqueduct of Segovia
Acueducto de Segovia
Spain40.948° N 4.118° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0 The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. 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.
Did you know? The aqueduct was declared a national monument of Spain in 1884, a century before its UNESCO listing.
02 Pontcysyllte Aqueduct
United Kingdom · 27.1 km from Chester52.970° N 3.088° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Adrian Pingstone · Public domain 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.
Did you know? The mortar of the stone piers was mixed from lime, water and ox blood.
03 Pont Saint-Bénézet
Pont d'Avignon
France · 39 km from Nîmes43.954° N 4.805° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rolf Kranz · CC BY-SA 4.0 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.
04 Forth Bridge
United Kingdom · 11.9 km from Edinburgh55.998° N 3.388° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Chorengel from Pixabay 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. 5 km long whose three great cantilever towers, each 110 metres high on granite piers, carry the double track 46 metres above high water.
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.
05 Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge
Bosnia and Herzegovina43.782° N 19.288° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 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.
06 Charles Bridge
Czech Republic · 0.8 km from Prague50.086° N 14.412° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zef51 from Pixabay 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.
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.
07 Stari Most
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 1.5 km from Mostar43.337° N 17.815° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MarcelDominic from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? Rebuilding began on 7 June 2001 and cost about 15.5 million US dollars, shared by the World Bank, UNESCO, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and several countries.
08 Ponte Vecchio
Italy · 1.4 km from Florence43.768° N 11.253° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by twalmedia from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? A bridge at this spot is first mentioned in documents as early as 996.
09 Les Ferreres Aqueduct
Acueducto de les Ferreres
Spain · 2.8 km from Tarragona41.146° N 1.244° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0 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.
Did you know? The aqueduct was declared a national historic-artistic monument in 1905, long before its World Heritage listing.
10 Vizcaya Bridge
Puente Vizcaya
Spain · 10.8 km from Bilbao43.323° N 3.017° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by simmering_prop from Pixabay The Vizcaya Bridge isn't just old — it's the prototype for a whole vanished category of engineering.
Did you know? Spain declared the bridge a national monument in 1984, more than twenty years before UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List.
11 Luiz I Bridge
Ponte de D. Luís
Portugal · 1.7 km from Porto41.140° N 8.609° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 2427999 from Pixabay The Dom Luís I Bridge is the iron signature of Porto: a single dark arch leaping the Douro gorge between the granite cliffs of the old city and the escarpment of Serra do Pilar in Vila Nova de Gaia, carrying two decks at two different heights. When it opened, its 172-metre arch was the longest of its kind in the world. It stands inside the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Porto, and it is part of the listing itself.
Did you know? The bridge has been a national monument of Portugal since 1982 and part of the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Porto since 1996.
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 UNESCO-listed bridges in Europe?
- On our list, Aqueduct of Segovia (Spain) ranks first, followed by Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (United Kingdom) and Pont Saint-Bénézet (France).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed bridges in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Spain (3), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2) and the United Kingdom (2).
- How many UNESCO-listed bridges are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 11 UNESCO-listed bridges in 7 countries. Spain has the most, with 3.