Vasco da Gama Bridge
Cable-stayed road bridge spanning seventeen kilometres of the Tagus estuary, Europe's longest at its opening.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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