Bastei Bridge

The Bastei Bridge is a sandstone viaduct of seven arches thrown across a 40-metre ravine among the rock towers of Saxon Switzerland, high above a bend of the Elbe. It is 76.5 metres long and was built in 1851 to replace a wooden bridge of 1826, linking the Bastei viewpoint with the neighbouring pinnacles and the remains of Neurathen Castle. What makes it memorable is how completely it belongs to its setting: built of the same pale, weathered sandstone as the crags it joins, it threads between needles and columns of rock so that from a distance it is hard to say where the masonry ends and the cliff begins.

The Bastei itself rises 194 metres above the river, its jagged towers carved by water erosion from a thick bed of sandstone over more than a million years. Its name means "bastion", after the medieval defences of Neurathen that used these rocks as part of their ring; the castle, the largest of the region's rock castles, survives as rock-cut rooms, beam sockets and a cistern that you reach across the bridge. From the lookout the view runs down to the Elbe and across to the table mountains of Lilienstein and Königstein, and the Ferdinandstein, a spur just off the path, gives the classic view back onto the arches of the bridge.

This is where the Romantic image of Saxon Switzerland was born. Visitors came from the 1790s onward, walking the Painters' Way (Malerweg) from Wehlen and Lohmen, and a butcher from Lohmen was already selling bread, beer and coffee from huts here by 1812. Caspar David Friedrich and Ludwig Richter drew these rocks, Goethe's son August wrote in 1819 of a view beyond words, and in 1853 the Saxon court photographer Hermann Krone took what are counted among the first landscape photographs in Germany at the Bastei Bridge; tablets on the rock pinnacle called the Jahrhundertturm remember him and the pioneers of local tourism. The long-distance Eisenach to Budapest trail still passes over the bridge.

Getting there

The Bastei is above the spa village of Kurort Rathen, about 10 kilometres from Pirna, southeast of Dresden; Dresden Airport (DRS) is about 29 kilometres away in a straight line. The S1 S-Bahn runs from Dresden to Kurort Rathen station, from where a small ferry crosses the Elbe to the village and a steep marked path climbs to the bridge; paddle steamers from Dresden also call at Rathen. By road there are car parks on the Bastei road with a shuttle, and bus 237 links the Bastei with Pirna and Sebnitz stations.