Rio-Antirrio bridge is an engineering marvel on the Gulf of Corinth

Built in an area with high seismisity, the Rio-Antirrio bridge is an engineering marvel spanning the Gulf of Corinth, in Greece.

Rio–Antirrio bridge

This creation of extraordinary engineering is 2,880 meters (9,450 ft) long and links the town of Rio on the Peloponnese peninsula to Antirrio on the mainland. It’s the longest cable-stayed bridge with a suspended deck in the world. This bridge is widely considered to be an engineering masterpiece, owing to several solutions applied to span the difficult site.

It opened in August 2004. The bridge carries the European Route 65. It’s truly an architectural and engineering marvel, which had to overcome an exceptional combination of adverse environmental conditions. The zone is one of the most seismic regions in Europe and contains one of the fastest opening, geological rift zones in the world. It’s said to be resistant to earthquakes of a magnitude of 7 on the Richter scale, winds of up to nearly 250 kilometres an hour, and the collision impact of a 180,000-tonne tanker moving at 16 knots.

The Rion — Antirion Bridge, officially the Charilaos Trikoupis bridge (a 19th-century Greek prime minister), is one of the most spectacular bridges in the world. The road over the bridge is asphalted. Due to the peculiar conditions of the straits, several unique engineering problems needed to be considered and overcome: deep water (65 m), insecure materials for foundations, withstand strong winds up to 180 km/hr, seismic activity, the probability of tsunamis, and tectonic movement.