A French bridge has been retaining the title of “tallest in the world” for two decades.
The Millau Viaduct is the multi-span cable-stayed bridge completed in 2004 that crosses the gorge valley on the river Tarn.
Located in the beautiful Occitanie region in southern France, the bridge’s longest span is 1,122ft, while its total length is 8,070ft.
It’s the height of the Millau Viaduct, however, that makes it a particularly impressive engineering work.
This amazing infrastructure, made of concrete and steel, has a structural height of 1,104ft. The structural height of a bridge consists of the maximum vertical distance from its uppermost part to the lowermost exposed part of the structure.
This means it is slightly taller than France’s most famous monument, the 1,083ft tall Eiffel Tower.
The viaduct cost €394million (£333m) to build. Its construction lasted for three years, and the infrastructure was eventually launched in December 2004.
This viaduct has been praised for its structure by several experts, including the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering, which described it as “an elegant, slender bridge … constructed using an innovative launching procedure”.
Among the records broken by this bridge is the creation of the highest road bridge deck in Europe, standing 870ft above the Tarn at its highest point.
Moreover, it includes the highest pylons in the world, with P2 and P3 measuring 803ft 8in and 725ft 3in in height respectively.
The Millau Viaduct is a few feet taller than the second-tallest bridge in the world, the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge. Launched in 2022, this Turkish bridge can claim the title of the world’s longest with its main span measuring 6,637ft.
The third and fourth tallest bridges in the world can both be found in China and are the Pingtang Bridge and Husutong Yangtze River Bridge respectively.