Pont d'Aquitaine
Steel suspension bridge lifted high above a tidal river to let ocean ships pass beneath it.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Pont d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux starts with an abandoned start: pylons driven into the Garonne mud in 1911 for a hanging ferry that never came, left standing for some forty years after the First World War stopped the work. It follows Jacques Chaban Delmas, the city's mayor turned national roads minister, reviving the project in 1954, and the engineers who then had to sink new foundations into a riverbed that never stops shifting with the tide. Listen for how much of the design answers to that unruly river rather than to the people crossing it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Pont Jacques Chaban Delmas
Vertical-lift span rising sixty times a year to let tall ships pass beneath its glowing pylons.
Pont Simone Veil
Concrete-and-steel river crossing engineered as Europe's widest bridge deck, doubling as a public esplanade.
Pont de Pierre
Brick nineteenth-century river crossing whose seventeen arches once carried a wired-for-demolition port to the brink of ruin.
Cap Sciences
Riverside science center built inside a former port hangar, deliberately turned to face the tidal water.
Porte de Bourgogne
Triumphal stone arch on a former salt marsh, its base buried when the square was later raised.
Bordeaux Saint-Jean
Vast iron-and-glass Belle Époque train shed, once Europe's largest, camouflaged blue against wartime bombers.