The Most Impressive Viaducts in the World
8 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive viaducts in the world are Millau Viaduct (France), Landwasser Viaduct (Switzerland) and Göltzsch Viaduct (Germany). The list covers 8 viaducts in 5 countries. France has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A viaduct is a road or railway that refuses to go down into a valley. Its beauty is rhythm and height: a row of piers repeated across a gorge, arches that shrink with distance, a deck held perfectly level while the ground falls away beneath it. The best of them also show what their builders had at hand, from hand-laid brick and local stone to wrought iron and, later, concrete and cable.
In this section the Landwasser Viaduct on Switzerland's Albula line curves on slender limestone piers straight into a tunnel in the cliff face. Saxony's Göltzsch Viaduct is the largest brick bridge in the world, and Ribblehead marches its arches across the Yorkshire moors. Gustave Eiffel's Garabit Viaduct spans its French gorge with a single iron arch, while Norman Foster's Millau Viaduct, opened in 2004, crosses the Tarn valley on masts that rise higher than the Eiffel Tower. The Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Scottish Highlands was built of mass concrete, and at Brusio a Swiss railway turns a full circle on itself to gain height.
The viaducts were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; country pages open the section by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Millau Viaduct | Viaduct | France | |
| 2 | Landwasser Viaduct | Viaduct | Switzerland | |
| 3 | Göltzsch Viaduct | Viaduct | Germany | |
| 4 | Glenfinnan Viaduct | Viaduct | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Garabit Viaduct | Viaduct | France | |
| 6 | Ribblehead Viaduct | Viaduct | United Kingdom | |
| 7 | Brusio spiral viaduct | Viaduct | Switzerland | |
| 8 | Nine Arch Bridge, Demodara | Viaduct | Sri Lanka |
01 Millau Viaduct
France44.080° N 3.022° E
Image by SchrijverijDrenthe from Pixabay The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the gorge of the Tarn west of Millau, in the Aveyron department of southern France, and it is one of the most beautiful bridges built in our time. The engineer Michel Virlogeux conceived it and Norman Foster's practice shaped its architecture: a single steel deck 2,460 metres long and 32 metres wide, hung from cables fanned out from seven masts, each 87 metres high, set on slender concrete piers. Its structural height of 343 metres made it the tallest bridge in the world for two decades.
Did you know? Pier P2 rises 245 metres to the level of the road, making it the tallest bridge pier in the world when it was finished in 2003.
02 Landwasser Viaduct
Landwasserviadukt
Switzerland · 23.1 km from Chur46.681° N 9.676° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Landwasser Viaduct is the image most people have of Alpine railways: six slender stone arches curving high above a wooded gorge and running straight into a tunnel mouth in a sheer cliff. It carries the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway over the Landwasser river between Schmitten and Filisur in Graubünden, 65 m above the stream and about 140 m long. The curve is tight, with a radius of only 100 m, the smallest used anywhere on the line, so from the train you can look forward and watch the front of your own train enter the rock.
Did you know? Around 22,000 trains a year cross the viaduct, roughly 60 every day.
03 Göltzsch Viaduct
Göltzschtalbrücke
Germany · 30.2 km from Gera50.623° N 12.246° E
Image by LPArt from Pixabay 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.
04 Glenfinnan Viaduct
United Kingdom · 20.6 km from Fort William56.876° N 5.432° W
Image by AnNacht_84 from Pixabay The Glenfinnan Viaduct carries the single-track West Highland Line in a long curve across the valley of the River Finnan at the head of Loch Shiel, and it is hard to imagine a railway placed more beautifully. Twenty-one semicircular arches, each spanning 15 metres, march across the glen at a height of about 30 metres on a sweeping curve, for a total length of 380 metres. Built between 1897 and 1901 by Robert McAlpine and Sons, it is the longest concrete railway bridge in Scotland. McAlpine, nicknamed Concrete Bob, chose mass concrete, with no steel reinforcement at all, because the local schist was so hard to work; his son Robert ran the job at 28.
Did you know? In 1987 engineer Roland Paxton used a borescope camera to look inside the piers for the legendary entombed horse and found no trace of it.
05 Garabit Viaduct
Viaduc de Garabit
France44.975° N 3.177° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Garabit viaduct carries a single railway track across the gorge of the Truyère in the Cantal, high in the Massif Central. Its centre is one great parabolic arch of wrought iron, 165 m wide and 52 m high, painted red and set against green hillsides. The whole structure is 565 m long. When the trains first crossed it, the deck stood about 122 m above the river, and for a time it was the highest viaduct in the world. Its arch was the longest ever built until the Dom Luís I Bridge in Porto overtook it in 1886.
Did you know? The ironwork of the viaduct is held together by 678,768 rivets.
06 Ribblehead Viaduct
United Kingdom54.210° N 2.370° W
Image by ebor from Pixabay The Ribblehead Viaduct carries the Settle–Carlisle railway across Batty Moss, a broad, wind-scoured bog at the head of Ribblesdale in the Yorkshire Dales. It is 402 metres long, stands 32 metres above the moor at its highest and runs on 24 arches, each spanning about 14 metres, their piers set on foundations sunk some 7.5 metres into the ground. Seen from below, with the flat top of Ingleborough on one side and the long ridge of Whernside on the other, it is one of the great images of Victorian engineering in open country.
Did you know? Every sixth pier is half as thick again as the others, so that if one pier failed only a section of arches would fall rather than the whole viaduct.
07 Brusio spiral viaduct
Kreisviadukt von Brusio
Switzerland46.254° N 10.128° E
Kabelleger / David Gubler ( http://www.bahnbilder.ch ) · CC BY 3.0 The Brusio spiral viaduct is the moment on the Bernina line when the train seems to chase its own tail. Just south of the village of Brusio, in the Val Poschiavo, the railway makes a full 360-degree loop and passes beneath itself, climbing on a curved stone viaduct of nine arches, each spanning 10 metres, set on a radius of 70 metres. The bridge alone is about 110 metres long, or nearly 143 including its approach embankment, and it crosses the valley floor between 7 and 17 metres up.
Did you know? For its 100th anniversary in 2008 the viaduct was decorated with lights so that it looked like a giant birthday cake.
08 Nine Arch Bridge, Demodara
Sri Lanka · 11.9 km from Badulla6.877° N 81.061° E
Image by jey360creations from Pixabay The Nine Arch Bridge carries the upcountry railway of Sri Lanka across a green ravine near Demodara, between the stations of Ella and Demodara, and it is one of the loveliest pieces of railway engineering in the tropics. Nine tall masonry arches, about 24 m high, march across the gap on a curve, framed by tea bushes and forested hillsides; at one end the line disappears into a tunnel. When a train comes through, the whole scene looks composed for a painting.
Did you know? The viaduct is popularly nicknamed the Bridge in the Sky.
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 is the most beautiful viaduct in the world?
- On our list, Millau Viaduct (France) ranks first, followed by Landwasser Viaduct (Switzerland) and Göltzsch Viaduct (Germany).
- What is the tallest bridge in the world?
- The Millau Viaduct in southern France has the tallest bridge structure in the world, with its highest mast rising about 343 metres above the ground. It was designed by Norman Foster with the engineer Michel Virlogeux and opened in 2004.
- What is the difference between a viaduct and a bridge?
- Every viaduct is a bridge, but the word is used for long crossings made of many spans carried on a series of piers, usually across a valley rather than a single river.
- Which viaduct appears in the Harry Potter films?
- The Glenfinnan Viaduct on the West Highland Line in Scotland, a curving concrete viaduct of 21 arches completed in 1901, is the one crossed by the Hogwarts Express.
- How many viaducts are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 8 viaducts in 5 countries. France has the most, with 2.