Golden Bridge (Bà Nà Hills)
Interesting facts
- The bridge is about 148.6 metres long and is divided into eight spans, the longest of them 21.2 metres.
- It stands at roughly 1,414 metres above sea level, and its deck is about 12.8 metres wide.
- The fingers of the two giant hands are each about two metres across.
- The walkway is decked in wooden planks about five centimetres thick, edged by gold-finished stainless steel railings.
- Purple chrysanthemums line each of the bridge's eight spans, adding colour to the gilded walkway.
- Construction took only about ten months, from July 2017 to April 2018, before the bridge opened to visitors in June 2018.
- The bridge links the resort's Marseille cable-car station with its gardens, including the Le Jardin d'Amour flower garden.
- Within months of opening, TIME magazine included the Golden Bridge in its list of the World's 100 Greatest Places of 2018.
Why it is worth it
The Golden Bridge is a gilded walkway about 150 metres long that curls across a mountainside in the Bà Nà Hills west of Da Nang, some 1,400 metres above sea level, held aloft, apparently, by two enormous weathered stone hands rising out of the forest. The hands are an illusion of the sculptor's craft: they are made of fibreglass and wire mesh wrapped around steel supports, finished with cracks and moss so that they look like the relics of some ancient colossus rather than something built in 2017. The bridge opened in June 2018 and its image quickly travelled around the world.
It was designed by TA Landscape Architecture, a Ho Chi Minh City practice, with Vu Viet Anh as principal designer and Trần Quang Hùng as bridge designer, for the resort developer Sun Group. The designers described the idea as a strip of gold drawn out of the mountain by the hands of the gods, and it took them months to convince the client. The practical brief was modest: to link a cable-car station with the resort's gardens while avoiding a steep slope. The design answer was to make the walk itself the destination, a path that loops almost back on itself so that people walking it see the hands, the railings and the valley below from constantly shifting angles.
The site matters as much as the sculpture. Bà Nà was founded as a hill station by the French in 1919 for its cool air, and the name is traced back to the Cham goddess Po Inu Nagar, whose worship once centred on these mountains. On clear mornings the view runs across forested ridges of the Trường Sơn range toward the coast; often cloud pours over the ridge and the bridge seems to float in white, with the hands appearing and vanishing in the mist. The resort around it is unapologetically a theme park, but the bridge itself achieves something few modern attractions manage, a single, instantly legible image of the mountain as something older and larger than the people crossing it.
Getting there
The bridge is at the Sun World Bà Nà Hills resort in Hòa Vang district, about 2 kilometres from the Bà Nà summit area; Da Nang city is around 40 kilometres away by road. Da Nang International Airport (DAD) is about 22 kilometres away in a straight line. Visitors reach the summit by the resort's cable cars from the base station; one line, opened in 2013, runs 5,801 metres without a stop.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Golden Bridge is a 150-metre-long (490 ft) pedestrian bridge in the Bà Nà Hills resort, in the Hòa Vang district of Da Nang, Vietnam. It is designed to connect the cable car station with the gardens and to provide a scenic overlook and tourist attraction. The bridge loops nearly back around to itself and has two giant hands, constructed of fibreglass and wire mesh, designed to appear like stone hands that support the structure.
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