Millau Viaduct
Interesting facts
- 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.
- 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.
- The steel deck was assembled on the plateaus and pushed out over the piers by computer-controlled hydraulic wedges, advancing 600 mm in cycles of about four minutes.
- Each mast was driven out along the deck lying flat, joined into one piece and then tilted upright in a single operation.
- The deck has the shape of an upside-down wing, so strong winds press it down rather than lift it, and it was designed for gusts of 225 km/h.
- The road is not straight but follows a gentle curve with a horizontal radius of about 20 kilometres.
- The cable stays are wrapped in a double helical strip that stops rainwater forming rivulets, which in high winds could set the cables vibrating.
- Fibre-optic sensors in the base of the tallest pier detect movements of a micrometre and can take up to 100 readings per second.
- The speed limit on the bridge was cut from 130 to 110 km/h because drivers kept slowing down to photograph the view.
- Before it opened to traffic in December 2004, about 19,000 walkers and runners crossed part of the deck on foot.
Why it is worth it
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.
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.
Seen from the valley, the deck seems to float across the gorge between the plateaus. Driving across is a strange experience of height, but the bridge is best appreciated from below or from the viewpoints around Millau, where its thin line and rhythm of masts read against the hills.
Getting there
The viaduct is about 5 km west of Millau. The Aire du Viaduc de Millau rest area, built around the old Brocuéjouls farm just north of the bridge, has parking and views of the structure; the crossing is part of the tolled A75–A71 route from Paris towards Béziers and Montpellier, with the toll plaza about 6 km north. The nearest airport is Rodez–Aveyron (RDZ), about 56 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Chaos de Montpellier-le-Vieux 15.7 km · rock-formation
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From the encyclopaedia
The Millau Viaduct is a multispan cable-stayed bridge completed in 2004 across the gorge valley of the Tarn near Millau in the Aveyron department in the Occitanie Region, in Southern France. The design team was led by engineer Michel Virlogeux and English architect Norman Foster. It was the tallest bridge in the world for over two decades, with a structural height of 343 metres (1,125 ft).
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