The Water Bridge

This is a channel-bridge over the River Elbe and joins the former East and West Germany, as part of the unification project. It is located in the city of Magdeburg, near Berlin. The photo was taken on the day of inauguration.

Six years, 500 million euros, 918 meters long... quite a feat of engineering.

In 2003, Deutsche Welle described the opening of the €500 million water bridge.

Engineers first dreamt of joining the two waterways as far back as 1919. Construction to bridge the Elbe river near Magdeburg actually started in the 1930s, but progress was halted during the Second World War in 1942. After the Cold War split Germany the project was shelved indefinitely, but things were put back on track following reunification in 1990.

Taking six years to build and costing around half a billion euros, the massive undertaking will connect Berlin’s inland harbor with the ports along the Rhine river. At the center of the project is Europe’s longest water bridge measuring in just shy of a kilometer at 918 meters. The huge tub to transport ships over the Elbe took 24,000 metric tons of steel and 68,000 cubic meters of concrete to build.