AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Millau Viaduct is the world's tallest bridge, a 2,460-metre cable-stayed giant whose highest mast rises 343 metres above the Tarn valley—thirteen metres above the top of the Eiffel Tower. Designed by French engineer Michel Virlogeux and British architect Lord Norman Foster, it threads a slender, gently curving steel deck across the valley on just seven impossibly thin piers, touching the ground at only nine points.↗↗
Completed in three years and opened along the A75 motorway (La Méridienne), the structure looks less like a highway overpass and more like a yacht laid end to end above the clouds. It has become one of France's most visited modern landmarks, and a magnet for photographers, road-trippers and architecture lovers who want to see 21st-century engineering at its most graceful.↗↗
A Record-Breaking Structure
The numbers are deliberately vertiginous. The steel deck stretches 2,460 metres and is 32 metres wide, supported by 154 stays and weighing a colossal 36,000 tonnes. The tallest of the seven piers, P2, climbs 245 metres on its own—taller than many skyscrapers—while the mast at the very top reaches the full 343 metres. With a span of 342 metres between piers, the Eiffel Tower could lie down flat and still fit in a single gap.
