Ask anyone to name the world's great canals and you will hear Suez and Panama. Neither comes close: Suez runs 193 km 120 mi and Panama just 82 km 51 mi, which makes them the most consequential short canals ever dug and nothing more. The channels that actually go the distance are mostly working water infrastructure rather than shipping lanes — irrigation arteries driven across deserts, and diversion canals carrying a river's worth of water from a country's wet end to its thirsty one. Ranked strictly by how far they run, the fifteen below stretch from 269 km 167 mi to 1,776 km 1,104 mi across nine countries and four continents. Two rules shape the order: we measure each canal's main line and stop there, so the Indira Gandhi Canal appears at its 650 km 400 mi channel rather than the 9,245 km 5,745 mi of distributaries hanging off it; and every entry has to be carrying water or traffic today, which is why India's silted Buckingham Canal, Ukraine's dried-out North Crimean Canal and Russia's part-built Great Stavropol Canal are all absent.
15 Longest Canals in the World (2026)
The record The longest canal in the world is the Grand Canal of China, in China — 1,776 km (1,104 mi), length. Source: Wikipedia (Grand Canal, China) infobox. Verified .
Longest Canals in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Longest Canals
- The top three each run more than 1,000 km 620 mi — the Grand Canal of China, the Karakum Canal and China's Middle Route account between them for nearly half the total length on this list.
- Suez and Panama are shorter than every canal here. At roughly 193 km 120 mi and 82 km 51 mi they fall well below the 269 km 167 mi cut-off, which says more about how we usually measure a canal's importance than about their size.
- Ten of the fifteen were dug to move water, not ships. Only the Grand Canal, the Erie Canal, the Mittelland Canal, the Marne-Rhine Canal and the Dortmund-Ems Canal were built primarily for navigation.
- Asia holds nine of the fifteen. China and Pakistan contribute two each and India three, a reflection of where the world's largest canal irrigation networks were built.
- One runs entirely downhill; another climbs half a kilometre. The Middle Route was graded so water reaches Beijing under gravity alone, without a single pumping station, while the Irtysh-Karaganda Canal needs 22 pumping stations to lift its water 475 m 1,558 ft.
- The longest is also among the oldest. Sections of the Grand Canal are more than two thousand years old, which makes it the rare record-holder that has never been beaten and never been rebuilt from scratch.
1. Grand Canal of China
At 1,776 km 1,104 mi, the Grand Canal of China is the longest artificial waterway ever built, and no rival has come close in more than a thousand years of trying. Its main stem, the Jing-Hang Grand Canal, links Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south, threading together the Yellow River, the Yangtze and three other major river systems along the way. It was dug to solve a political problem rather than a commercial one: successive dynasties needed to move surplus grain from the fertile Yangtze and Huai valleys north to feed their capitals and their standing armies. Sections of it are more than two thousand years old, and UNESCO added the canal to the World Heritage list in 2014 as a single property covering 27 sections and 58 heritage sites.
Not every kilometre floats a barge today. Only the stretch from Hangzhou to Liangshan County is currently navigable, and parts north of the Yellow River run all but dry, though China has been restoring flow along the northern reaches and celebrated the reconnected canal on World Water Day in 2025. Where it does carry traffic, it carries a great deal of it: the Jiangnan Canal in the far south and the Inner Canal further north are both heavily worked by barge convoys. The canal has also been given a second job, serving as the spine of the Eastern Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project.
2. Karakum Canal
The Karakum Canal runs 1,375 km 854 miles across one of the driest landscapes on the planet, drawing from the Amu Darya on Turkmenistan's eastern border and carrying its water west through the Karakum Desert towards Etrek near the Caspian. It is navigable over much of that length, which makes it a rare thing among the giants of this list: an irrigation canal you can also travel along. Turkmen usage has quietly promoted it, and the channel is widely referred to at home as the Turkmen River. Ashgabat, Bereket and Gyzylarbat all drink from it.
Built during the Soviet era as one of the largest desert irrigation schemes ever attempted, it moves roughly 13 cubic kilometres of water a year and is the plain reason agriculture exists across southern Turkmenistan at all. It also demonstrates the cost of that achievement. Much of the canal is unlined, so about a quarter of the water entering it soaks straight into the sand before reaching a field, silting is a persistent maintenance burden, and reservoirs along its course have fallen to worryingly low levels in recent dry years.
3. South-North Water Diversion Middle Route
About 1,276 km 793 miles of purpose-built trunk canal separates the Danjiangkou Reservoir, straddling Hubei and Henan, from the taps of Beijing, and that channel is the South-North Water Diversion Middle Route. Its most elegant feature is what it lacks: the engineers laid the whole route on a continuous downhill gradient, so water runs from the reservoir to the capital under gravity alone, without a single pumping station along the main line. The full main canal is quoted at 1,432 km 890 mi once the 155 km 96 mi Tianjin branch is added, which is why the shorter trunk figure is the one that belongs on a like-for-like ranking.
Water started flowing in December 2014, and the scale of what has moved since is difficult to picture. By August 2026 the Middle Route had transferred more than 80 billion cubic metres northwards, serving something close to 118 million people across 27 cities and 243 counties in Henan, Hebei, Tianjin and Beijing. Henan carries the longest share of the trunk line at 731 km 454 mi. Its sibling, the project's Eastern Route, does not appear separately on this list because it is largely an upgrade of the Grand Canal rather than a new channel.
4. Indira Gandhi Canal
The Indira Gandhi Canal carries Himalayan meltwater 650 km 400 miles into the Thar Desert, beginning at the Harike Barrage in Punjab, where the Beas and the Sutlej meet, and ending in the sand of western Rajasthan. It is really two channels in series: the 204 km 127 mi Rajasthan Feeder brings the water south, and the Indira Gandhi Main Canal takes it another 445 km 277 mi out into the desert. Roughly 167 km 104 mi of the route lies in Punjab and Haryana, with the remainder in Rajasthan.
What makes it remarkable is less the length than the destination. This is a canal built to push agriculture into one of the most arid inhabited regions on Earth, and the main line is only the trunk of something far larger. Counting every feeder and distributary, the network runs to about 9,245 km 5,745 mi, and the final portion of the scheme was not completed until 2010. The transformation has not been uncomplicated, with waterlogging and salinity following the water into soils that had never held it before.
5. Erie Canal
The Erie Canal measures 351 miles 565 km today, running clear across New York State from the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It was longer at the start: when it opened in 1825 the canal ran 363 miles 584 km, and successive enlargements and realignments have straightened a few kilometres out of it since. Thirty-five locks handle the climb between the Hudson and the lake, with a maximum draft of about 12 feet 3.7 m.
No canal on this list changed a country's economic geography more decisively. By opening a water route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes it is widely credited with making New York City the young republic's dominant port and pulling settlement west along its banks. Today the New York State Canal Corporation looks after it, and the traffic is mostly recreational, though commercial barges have made a modest return as operators rediscover how fuel-efficient moving freight by water is compared with road or rail.
6. Central Arizona Project Canal
The Central Arizona Project Canal is a 336 mi 541 km diversion canal that lifts Colorado River water out of Lake Havasu and carries it clear across the desert to Pima County, south of Tucson. It is an open, concrete-lined channel for essentially its whole run, which is what separates it from the aqueduct systems that mix canal with buried pipeline and tunnel.
Geography made it expensive to run as well as to build. The canal ends far above the elevation where it starts, so its 14 pumping plants raise the water by up to 2,900 feet 880 m on the way inland, drawing about 2.5 million MWh of electricity a year to do it. Construction began in 1973 and the system was substantially complete by 1993. It is owned by the US Bureau of Reclamation and operated by the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, and it is rated to deliver around 456 billion US gallons a year to the cities and farms of central and southern Arizona.
7. Narmada Main Canal
The Narmada Main Canal runs 532 kilometres 331 mi from the Sardar Sarovar Dam at Kevadia in Gujarat, holding 458 km 285 mi of that length within Gujarat before crossing into Rajasthan near Shilu, in the Sanchor tehsil of Jalore, for a final 74 km 46 mi. It is a contour canal, tracing the land's own gradient across western India rather than cutting through it, and it is the second-longest canal in India after the Indira Gandhi Canal.
By volume it outranks everything else in the country. The canal takes 40,000 cusecs at its source, making it India's largest by carrying capacity, and with 42 branch canals hanging off it the system irrigates roughly 2,129,000 hectares of farmland across the two states. Water reached Rajasthan for the first time at Sillu village on 27 March 2008, and the canal was formally inaugurated the following month. Its enormous distributary network, by contrast, is still far from finished.
8. Irtysh-Karaganda Canal
The Irtysh-Karaganda Canal covers 451 km 280 miles between the Irtysh River near Aksu and the industrial city of Karaganda in north-central Kazakhstan. It exists because Karaganda's coalfields and heavy industry grew up in a place with almost no water of its own, and the only fix was to fetch some from several hundred kilometres away. After Kazakh independence the canal was renamed for the geologist Kanysh Satpayev, and the Satpayev Canal is the name you will now see on Kazakh maps.
The engineering problem here was vertical rather than horizontal. Karaganda sits far higher than the Irtysh, so the water has to be lifted 475 m 1,558 ft in total by a chain of 22 pumping stations spaced along the route. Construction ran from 1962 to 1974. A 2013 assessment found the canal working at only about half its design capacity, and a reconstruction and modernisation programme has been planned for the second half of this decade.
9. Nara Canal
At 226 miles 364 km, the Nara Canal is the longest canal in Pakistan. It takes off from the Sukkur Barrage on the Indus and runs southeast through Sindh, following the bed of an old delta channel of the river towards Shakoor Lake and, eventually, Kori Creek. That inherited course is why it reads more like a river than a cutting for much of its length.
It is one of the largest irrigation channels anywhere, watering something in the order of two million acres of farmland across the Khairpur, Sanghar, Mirpurkhas and Umerkot districts. The Sukkur Barrage that feeds it supplies both banks of the Indus across a command area of roughly eight million acres, and close to 80 per cent of Sindh's agriculture depends on water released there. A long-running rehabilitation of the barrage, replacing its gates in batches, is due to run to 2027.
10. Ibrahimiya Canal
The Ibrahimiya Canal is 350 kilometers 220 miles long and is the largest artificial canal in Egypt, which in a country defined by a single river is a considerable claim. It leaves the left bank of the Nile at Assiut and runs north through Middle Egypt to Al Ayat in Giza, shadowing the river it was drawn from. The Assiut Barrage, added three decades after the canal itself, regulates how much water it takes.
It was dug in 1873, during the reign of Ismail Pasha as Khedive of Egypt, and was the most important public work carried out under the newly created Ministry of Public Works. The purpose was specific and commercial: to give perennial irrigation, rather than the single annual flood, to the Khedivial sugar estates of Middle Egypt. Between its own reach and the channels that branch from it, the canal came to supply irrigation to something approaching a million acres.
11. Rohri Canal
The Rohri Canal runs 208 miles 335 km south through Sindh and is, after the Nara, the second of the two great channels taking off from the left bank of the Indus at the Sukkur Barrage near Rohri. It is a perennial canal, meaning it carries water year-round rather than only during the flood season, which is what allows the land beneath it to grow more than one crop a year.
Its command runs through Sukkur, Khairpur, Naushero, Shaheed Benazirabad, Matiari, Hyderabad, Sanghar and Badin, and the ground it waters is some of the most valuable in the province, producing high-value banana and mango crops. Locals sometimes describe it as a mini-Indus, which is less hyperbole than it sounds given the discharge it carries. Like its larger neighbour it depends entirely on the Sukkur Barrage, itself the subject of a multi-year modernisation.
12. Mittelland Canal
At 325.7 km 202.4 mi, the Mittelland Canal is the longest artificial waterway in Germany and the principal east-west link in the country's inland navigation network. It begins where it meets the Dortmund-Ems Canal at Hoerstel, near Rheine, and runs east to join the Elbe and the Elbe-Havel Canal near Magdeburg, tying the Rhine and Ruhr industrial region to the rivers of the German east.
Unlike most long canals it contains no natural river section at all: every metre of it was constructed, which is unusual at this length and is precisely what earns it the German record. Because the terrain it crosses is not obliging, it carries itself over the landscape in places rather than cutting through it, most famously at Minden, where it crosses the river Weser on two aqueducts completed in 1914 and 1998. Freight still moves along it, although the traffic mix has shifted since the Mehrum power station, which took its bituminous coal by canal, came off the grid.
13. Marne-Rhine Canal
The Marne-Rhine Canal covers 313 km 194 mi across north-eastern France, connecting the Marne at Vitry-le-Francois to the Rhine at Strasbourg and, in doing so, joining the Atlantic river system to the great artery of central Europe. It is a heavily engineered route with 154 locks, and the summit crossings between the Moselle and the Rhine watersheds are the reason there are so many.
The canal is no longer quite the continuous cutting it was built as. In 1979 a 23-kilometre section was superseded when traffic was rerouted onto the canalised river Moselle between Toul and Pompey. Its most striking feature dates from a decade earlier: an inclined plane at Saint-Louis-Arzviller, a boat lift that carries vessels up the hillside in a water-filled caisson and replaced a long and slow flight of locks. Voies navigables de France manages the route, and the traffic today is essentially pleasure boating rather than commerce.
14. Kakatiya Canal
The Kakatiya Canal runs 284 km 176 miles through Telangana, from the Sriram Sagar Reservoir on the Godavari to the Lower Manair Dam, and its formal name, the SRSP Kakatiya Canal, records the Sriram Sagar Project it belongs to. It carries a flow of 9,700 cusecs and passes through the Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Warangal and Khammam districts on its way across the northern half of the state.
It is not simply an irrigation channel but an inter-basin transfer, taking Godavari water and delivering it into the Krishna basin in the Warangal and Khammam districts, which is a substantial redistribution of a region's hydrology. The canal supports an ayacut of roughly 911,000 acres, making it the backbone of agriculture across North Telangana, and it supplies drinking water to several major towns along its route as well.
15. Dortmund-Ems Canal
The Dortmund-Ems Canal is a 269-kilometre (167 mi) route between the inland port of Dortmund and the seaport of Emden on the North Sea, and it is the backbone of the West German canal network. Opened in 1899, it was built to give the Ruhr's coal and steel industry a direct water connection to a German seaport of its own.
Its composition is worth being precise about, because it explains the figure. Roughly 215 km 134 mi of the route is cut canal, a 45 km 28 mi stretch uses the canalised river Ems, and a final 9 km 5.6 mi of purpose-built channel carries vessels the last distance to Emden. That final cutting exists because the inland barges of the day were not built for the open-water conditions they would have met crossing the Dollart estuary. The canal was repaired after wartime damage and upgraded in 1962 to take larger vessels, and it remains a working freight route today.
FAQ: The World's Longest Canals
What is the longest canal in the world?
The Grand Canal of China, at 1,776 km 1,104 mi between Beijing and Hangzhou. It has held the title for well over a thousand years, and UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 2014. Only part of it is navigable today, though the southern sections still carry heavy barge traffic.
Why aren't the Suez and Panama canals on this list?
Because they are short. The Suez Canal runs about 193 km 120 mi and the Panama Canal only 82 km 51 mi, well below the 269 km 167 mi needed to reach this ranking. Both matter for strategic reasons rather than length: each cuts weeks off an ocean voyage, which is a different achievement entirely.
What is the longest canal in the United States?
The Erie Canal, at 351 miles 565 km across New York State from Albany to Buffalo. It opened in 1825 at 363 miles 584 km and has been slightly shortened by later realignment. The Central Arizona Project Canal is close behind at 336 miles 541 km, though it carries water rather than boats.
Which is the longest irrigation canal?
Of the canals here, the longest built primarily to irrigate farmland is the Karakum Canal in Turkmenistan, at 1,375 km 854 mi. It draws from the Amu Darya and crosses the Karakum Desert, and is navigable along much of its length as well, which is unusual for an irrigation channel.
Are all of these canals still in use?
Yes, and that is a deliberate rule of this ranking: every entry is carrying water or traffic today. It is also why some famous long canals are missing. India's 796 km 495 mi Buckingham Canal is silted and encroached rather than navigable, and Ukraine's 402 km 250 mi North Crimean Canal has been dry since June 2023.
What is the difference between a canal and a waterway?
A canal is an artificial channel dug for the purpose. A waterway can be a chain of natural rivers and lakes joined by comparatively short artificial cuts. That distinction keeps Russia's Volga-Baltic Waterway and Canada's Trent-Severn Waterway off this list, since most of their length is river and lake rather than excavated canal.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.