The Most Impressive Viaducts in Europe
7 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most impressive viaducts in Europe are Millau Viaduct (France), Landwasser Viaduct (Switzerland) and Göltzsch Viaduct (Germany). The list covers 7 viaducts in 4 countries. France has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's great viaducts were born of the railway age, when lines had to cross deep valleys without steep gradients, and engineers responded with stone, brick and iron on a monumental scale. In mountainous countries such as Switzerland, viaducts became part of spectacular routes that curve and spiral through the Alps. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, steel and concrete allowed spans and heights that would once have been unthinkable.
The Millau Viaduct, opened in 2004 across the Tarn valley in southern France, is the tallest bridge in the world, with one mast reaching 343 metres above the ground. Not far away, the Garabit Viaduct, built by Gustave Eiffel's company in the 1880s, crosses a gorge on a red wrought-iron arch. The Göltzsch Viaduct in Saxony, completed in 1851, is the largest brick bridge in the world, built from millions of bricks in four tiers of arches.
In the Alps, the Landwasser Viaduct carries the Rhaetian Railway on a curve high above a gorge before plunging straight into a tunnel in a sheer cliff, and the Brusio spiral viaduct on the Bernina line turns a full circle to gain height in the valley. Britain's viaducts belong to landscapes of moorland and lochs: the Glenfinnan Viaduct, one of the first large structures built of mass concrete, curves in 21 arches above Loch Shiel, and the Ribblehead Viaduct strides across a Yorkshire Dales moor on 24 stone arches.
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 |
01 Millau Viaduct
France44.080° N 3.022° E
Image by SchrijverijDrenthe from Pixabay The bridge solved an old problem. For years holiday traffic between Paris and Spain crawled through the town of Millau in the valley, and in the 1990s the state studied routes around it before choosing a high crossing directly over the Tarn. The Eiffage group financed and built it within three years, with its subsidiary Eiffel, heir to the firm of Gustave Eiffel, who had built the nearby Garabit viaduct in 1884, making the steel deck. It was inaugurated on 14 December 2004 and opened to traffic two days later; in 2006 it received the Outstanding Structure Award of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.
Did you know? The concrete piers grew by about 4 metres every three days, thanks to sliding formwork that allowed a fresh layer of concrete every 20 minutes.
02 Landwasser Viaduct
Landwasserviadukt
Switzerland · 23.1 km from Chur46.681° N 9.676° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The viaduct was designed by Alexander Acatos and built by the firm Müller & Zeerleder in 1901 and 1902. The builders did without conventional scaffolding for the tall piers; the limestone pillars were raised around steel-reinforced cores with the help of cranes, while the flat arches between them each span 20 m. About 9,200 cubic metres of dark local limestone went into the masonry, and the 216 m Landwasser Tunnel beyond was aligned with the bridge so that the track leaves the arches and enters the cliff face without a pause. For more than a century the structure needed no major work; its first renovation came in 2009, carried out while trains kept running.
Did you know? The piers were raised without scaffolding partly to save money and partly because the Landwasser river was prone to dangerous floods.
03 Göltzsch Viaduct
Göltzschtalbrücke
Germany · 30.2 km from Gera50.623° N 12.246° E
Image by LPArt from Pixabay The human cost behind the record is less often mentioned than the record itself: 1,736 workers were employed on the construction over its five years, and 31 of them died on site, working with the scaffolding and hoisting equipment of the 1840s at heights that modern safety standards wouldn't tolerate for a moment. Engineer Johann Andreas Schubert designed it as part of the new Leipzig–Dresden railway network, at a moment when railway engineering itself was barely a generation old and every large viaduct was still, in some sense, an experiment.
Did you know? Johann Andreas Schubert, who chaired the competition jury, then designed the bridge himself using the new thrust-line theory, making it one of the first bridges anywhere planned by structural calculation.
04 Glenfinnan Viaduct
United Kingdom · 20.6 km from Fort William56.876° N 5.432° W
Image by AnNacht_84 from Pixabay Below the viaduct the valley opens onto the waters of Loch Shiel, and at its head stands the Glenfinnan Monument. This 18-metre tower, designed by James Gillespie Graham and built in 1815, marks the spot where Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, raised his standard on 19 August 1745 and launched the last Jacobite rising; a statue of a Highlander was placed on top in 1835. From the slopes above, the curve of arches, the column and the loch fit into a single view that has become one of the defining images of the Highlands.
Did you know? Although the concrete arches were finished in October 1898, the viaduct was not officially opened until 1 April 1901.
05 Garabit Viaduct
Viaduc de Garabit
France44.975° N 3.177° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The idea came from a young state engineer, Léon Boyer. He argued that the Marvejols–Neussargues line should stay up on the plateau and leap the gorge at full height rather than wind down into the valleys. For the bridge itself the state turned to Gustave Eiffel's company without competitive tender, because Eiffel had just built the Maria Pia Bridge over the Douro in Porto, which posed the same problem. Maurice Koechlin did the structural engineering. Construction took place between 1880 and 1884, and the line through the viaduct opened in 1888. Eiffel's calculations proved exact: a passing train deflects the deck by about 8 mm, just as he had predicted.
Did you know? The bridge used about 3,169 tonnes of iron, with only small amounts of steel and cast iron, resting on more than 20,000 cubic metres of masonry.
06 Ribblehead Viaduct
United Kingdom54.210° N 2.370° W
Image by ebor from Pixabay The line was the Midland Railway's bid for its own route to Scotland, and the viaduct was designed by its chief engineer, John Sydney Crossley. The first stone was laid on 12 October 1870, the work was finished by the end of 1874, and goods trains began crossing in August 1875, with passenger services following in May 1876. Up to 2,300 navvies worked on this section, living with their families in shanty settlements on the moor with names like Batty Wife Hole, Sebastopol and Belgravia. More than a hundred died from accidents, fights and smallpox.
Did you know? In 1964 the wind on Batty Moss was strong enough to blow several new Humber cars off the wagons of a freight train crossing the 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 It exists because the engineers refused to use a rack. The Bernina Railway was designed as an adhesion line, fit for freight as well as passengers, with a maximum gradient of 7 percent, and between Brusio and Campocologno the valley drops faster than that. Several solutions were drawn up in 1906, among them an S-shaped embankment and an eight-arch bridge; a spiral tunnel was also considered but the geology argued against it. The open loop that returns under its own viaduct first appears in a plan of October 1906, perhaps because it needed less land. Work started in March 1907, and the section from Tirano to Poschiavo opened on 1 July 1908.
Did you know? The line it carries reaches 2,253 metres at the Bernina Pass, the highest railway crossing in Europe, without any rack assistance.
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 impressive viaducts in Europe?
- On our list, Millau Viaduct (France) ranks first, followed by Landwasser Viaduct (Switzerland) and Göltzsch Viaduct (Germany).
- Which country has the most viaducts in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from France (2), Switzerland (2) and the United Kingdom (2).
- What is the tallest bridge in the world?
- The Millau Viaduct in France is the tallest bridge in the world by structural height, with its highest mast reaching 343 metres. It was designed by the engineer Michel Virlogeux with the architect Norman Foster.
- Which viaduct appears in the Harry Potter films?
- The Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Scottish Highlands is the one the Hogwarts Express crosses in the films. It was completed in 1901 and carries the West Highland Line.
- Did Gustave Eiffel build the Garabit Viaduct?
- Yes. The Garabit Viaduct was designed and built by Eiffel's company and completed in 1884, a few years before the Eiffel Tower, whose techniques it helped prove.
- How many viaducts are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 7 viaducts in 4 countries. France has the most, with 2.