Pont de Normandie

Where the Seine finally widens into the English Channel, a pale ribbon of road climbs out of the marshes, hangs high over the shipping lane and comes down again on the far bank more than two kilometres later. The Pont de Normandie is the last crossing of the river before the sea, and when it opened in January 1995 its central span of 856 metres was the longest of any cable-stayed bridge in the world, beating the previous record, held by a bridge in Shanghai, by more than 250 metres. Seen from the estuary, its two concrete towers and the fans of cables that run down from them give the structure the weightless look of a drawing rather than a piece of motorway.

The bridge was conceived by the French engineer Michel Virlogeux, a specialist in cable-stayed design, with François Doyelle and Charles Lavigne as architects; a consortium of major French and Danish contractors built it between 1988 and 1995. A cable-stayed solution was chosen over a suspension bridge because it cost less and stood up better to the strong winds that sweep the estuary. Each tower is an inverted Y of prestressed concrete about 215 metres tall, and because they must be truly vertical, their tops sit a few centimetres further apart than their bases, following the curvature of the Earth. The central 624 metres of the deck are steel, the rest prestressed concrete, and the roadway clears high water by more than 50 metres so that large ships can continue upriver to Rouen. The record span lasted until 1999, when the Tatara Bridge in Japan surpassed it.

The bridge links two very different towns. On the north bank lies Le Havre, the great port city flattened in 1944 and rebuilt to the plans of the architect Auguste Perret, whose concrete centre is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On the south bank is Honfleur, a small harbour of tall slate-hung houses that drew Boudin, Monet and other painters in the nineteenth century. Between them, the mudflats and reed beds under the bridge form part of a protected estuary landscape, rich in wading birds, where the river's tides and the sea meet.

Getting there

The bridge carries the A29 motorway across the Seine estuary between Le Havre and Honfleur; Honfleur lies a few kilometres from its southern end, the centre of Le Havre about 15 km west of the northern end, and the small town of Montivilliers about 14 km away. Pedestrians and cyclists can cross on narrow lanes along the deck. The nearest airport is Deauville Normandie (DOL), about 11 km away, and Le Havre's railway station has direct trains to Paris Saint-Lazare.