Piercing the sky above the verdant hills of southern France, a stunningly modern roadway bridge hailed as the tallest in the world was to be officially inaugurated on Tuesday.
Celebrated as a work of art and an object of French national pride, the Millau bridge will enable motorists to take a drive through the sky — 270m above the Tarn valley for a 2,5km stretch through France’s Massif Central mountains.
Designed by British architect Norman Foster, the steel-and-concrete bridge with its streamlined diagonal suspension cables rests on seven pillars — the tallest measuring 340m, making it 16m taller than the Eiffel Tower.
The bridge, which has an airy and fluid appearance, was designed to have the ”delicacy of a butterfly”, Foster said in an interview with regional daily newspaper Midi Libre.
”A work of man must fuse with nature. The pillars had to look almost organic, like they had grown from the earth,” said Foster, who also designed London’s Millennium Bridge.
Colorado’s Royal Gorge Bridge, towering 331m above the Arkansas River, is the world’s tallest suspension bridge — but it is designed for pedestrians. The Kochertal viaduct in Germany was the highest roadway, at 185m, officials said.
French President Jacques Chirac was to inaugurate the bridge on Tuesday in Millau, a town best known outside France as the place where anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove dismantled a McDonald’s restaurant.
The bridge, nearly three years in construction, opens to vehicles on Thursday.
The €394-million (about R2,6-billion) bridge was commissioned to open a new north-south link between Paris and the Mediterranean, and is expected to relieve bottlenecks caused by trucks and tourists headed to the Riviera.
Images of the bridge, which dominates the surrounding Rhone Valley countryside for kilometres, have appeared in national media for days. Aerial photos published in Le Monde‘s Tuesday edition show the bridge rising above the clouds, and the newspaper’s editorial declares it ”a work of art”.
About 28 000 vehicles a day are expected to cross the bridge in the summer months, and about 10 000 a day the rest of the year, according to France’s Eiffage construction company, which built it. — Sapa-AP