The Most Remarkable Boat Lifts in the World
4 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable boat lifts in the world are Falkirk Wheel (United Kingdom), Historic Boat Lifts of the Canal du Centre, La Louvière (Belgium) and Bingley Five Rise Locks (United Kingdom). The list covers 4 boat lifts in 3 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Locks raise boats with water; boat lifts raise them with machinery, and that is where engineering becomes spectacle. A whole vessel, still floating in its tank, is carried up or down in a single movement, by counterweights, hydraulic rams, rails or a turning wheel. The best of them are sculptural objects as much as canal infrastructure, and watching one work is the point of the visit.
The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland, opened in 2002, is the world's only rotating boat lift: two water-filled gondolas turn on a single axis to join the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. The historic lifts of the Canal du Centre near La Louvière in Belgium are hydraulic giants from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In Kyoto, the Keage Incline carried boats of the Lake Biwa Canal on rail carriages down a slope that is now lined with cherry trees, and England's Bingley Five Rise shows the older way of climbing a hill, through a staircase of locks.
The places here 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, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Falkirk Wheel | Boat lift | United Kingdom | |
| 2 | Historic Boat Lifts of the Canal du Centre, La Louvière | Boat lift | Belgium | |
| 3 | Bingley Five Rise Locks | Boat lift | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Keage Incline | Boat lift | Japan |
01 Falkirk Wheel
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Glasgow56.000° N 3.842° W
Sean Mack · CC BY 2.5 The Falkirk Wheel is the only rotating boat lift in the world, a sculpture of steel that lifts canal boats 24 metres between two waterways in one slow, silent turn. It joins the Forth and Clyde Canal below with the Union Canal above, reconnecting Glasgow and Edinburgh by water for the first time since the 1930s. The canals had been linked here by a flight of eleven locks that took most of a day to pass; the locks were dismantled in 1933, and by the 1970s both canals were blocked or filled in. The Millennium Link project, funded in part by the National Lottery's Millennium Commission, restored them, and Queen Elizabeth II opened the wheel on 24 May 2002.
Did you know? The wheel is held together without welds: over 14,000 bolts in some 45,000 bolt holes, chosen to resist fatigue from its constant rotation.
02 Historic Boat Lifts of the Canal du Centre, La Louvière
Scheepsliften op het Centrumkanaal
Belgium · 11.4 km from Mons50.471° N 4.095° E
LimoWreck · CC BY-SA 3.0 Between Houdeng-Goegnies and Thieu, on the western edge of the Belgian Centre coalfield, an old canal climbs a slope that no chain of locks could reasonably handle: over a stretch of about seven kilometres the water level changes by some 66 metres. The answer, built between 1885 and 1917, was a staircase of four hydraulic boat lifts. The first, at Houdeng-Goegnies, lifts boats 15.40 metres and went into service in 1888; the other three, at Houdeng-Aimeries, Strépy-Bracquegnies and Thieu, each rise 16.93 metres and were finished in 1917, though the First World War delayed their formal inauguration until 1919. They are the only lifts of their kind from that era still in working order, and since 1998 they have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Did you know? Each loaded caisson of the old lifts weighs about 598 tonnes, yet one lift cycle needs only a 30-centimetre water surcharge to move it.
More about Historic Boat Lifts of the Canal du Centre, La Louvière →
03 Bingley Five Rise Locks
United Kingdom · 9 km from Bradford53.856° N 1.838° W
Sirenuk · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bingley Five Rise Locks carry the Leeds and Liverpool Canal up one of the steepest sections of its route, in the town of Bingley in West Yorkshire. They were designed and built under the canal's chief engineer, John Longbotham, and opened on 21 March 1774 after about three years of construction, an event marked at the time by large crowds gathering to watch the first boats pass through.
Did you know? About 30,000 people are said to have turned out for the opening in 1774, and the first boat took just 28 minutes to climb the whole staircase.
04 Keage Incline
Japan · 4.8 km from Kyoto35.008° N 135.791° E
Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Keage Incline is a railway for boats. Between 1891 and 1948 it carried cargo and passenger boats on flat wagons up and down a 36-metre drop at the western end of the Lake Biwa Canal, the great engineering project that brought water from Japan's largest lake over the hills into Kyoto. The canal itself was built between 1885 and 1890 under Tanabe Sakurō, a young graduate of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo who had written his thesis on the scheme and was then hired as its chief engineer. Where the canal reached the steep slope above Nanzen-ji, boats could not continue by water, so they were winched along rails some 582 metres long between the Keage and Nanzen-ji docks.
Did you know? In August 2025 the incline became one of five Lake Biwa Canal structures named National Treasures, the first modern civil-engineering works in Japan so honoured.
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 only rotating boat lift in the world?
- The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland, opened in 2002, is the only rotating boat lift in the world. It links the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.
- How does a boat lift differ from a lock?
- A lock raises or lowers a boat by filling or emptying a chamber with water, while a boat lift moves the boat in a water-filled tank or caisson by mechanical means, often in a single step over a much greater height.
- Which country has the most remarkable boat lifts?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (2), Belgium (1) and Japan (1).
- Where are the historic boat lifts of the Canal du Centre?
- They stand on the old Canal du Centre near La Louvière in the Belgian province of Hainaut. These hydraulic lifts were listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.
- How many boat lifts are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 4 boat lifts in 3 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 2.