Picture the scene. Africa, a young Neanderthal, lithe, hairy, fantastically fit, emerges from a clearing, makes his way down to a river, pauses, then runs nimbly across the dead tree that reaches from one side of the river to the other. And there it is, the first bridge crossing, and no one even made a note of it. Ever since that unrecorded moment, we’ve pushed at the limits of engineering and design, and improved on the dead tree over the river pretty much every time. To the point where we can put a bridge almost anywhere. We’ve got bridges that span rivers, that traverse mountain ranges, bridges over oceans, that connect countries, soar above jungles, and in the case of the Bosphorous bridge, that stick one continent to another. Sometimes, they seem almost timeless, transcendent. One of them is older than Christ. Let’s face it, we couldn’t live without bridges. So we’ve gathered together the most amazing bridges in the world that we could find.
