Vasco da Gama Bridge

This guide to the Vasco da Gama Bridge in Lisbon starts in 1995, when engineers racing to finish Europe's longest bridge before Expo '98 ran into a problem da Gama never faced: the curvature of the Earth itself, throwing off a straight line stretched across 17.2 kilometres of the Tagus estuary. You'll hear how satellite coordination, almost unheard of on a civil project at the time, solved the alignment, and how the memory of Lisbon's 1755 earthquake shaped piers drilled deep beneath the riverbed. It traces a project built against a five-hundred-year anniversary and a very tight deadline.