Delicate Arch is on Utah's licence plates, and it would not come close to making this list: its opening is about 32 feet across. Span is a stricter measure than fame. The Natural Arch and Bridge Society takes it at the narrowest point of the opening, which is why the Great Arch of Getu measures roughly 305 feet across its mouth but ranks here on the 230 feet where the passage pinches, and why Rainbow Bridge fell from a long-quoted 275 feet to 234 when a laser replaced a 1974 tape measure. The rock never moved; the method did. Everything below is also still standing, which rules out a natural bridge that appeared overnight in Ecuador in 2020, may have outspanned the world record, and was gone inside a year. What remains runs from 230 feet to a shade under 400, and it is not spread evenly: seven of the twelve are in southern China.
12 Longest Natural Arches in the World (2026)
The record The longest natural arch in the world is Xianren Bridge (Fairy Bridge), in China — 400 ± 15 feet (121.9 ± 4.6 m), span. Source: NABS (measured by Gunter Welz, Oct 2010) + Guinness World Records. Verified .
Longest Natural Arches in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Longest Natural Arches
- The world record-holder was found on satellite imagery. Xianren Bridge went unrecorded outside its own valleys until a Natural Arch and Bridge Society founder picked it out on Google Earth in 2009; an expedition reached it the following October and measured 400 feet.
- Seven of the twelve stand in two Chinese provinces. Guizhou and Guangxi between them hold Xianren Bridge, Zhijin, Dachuandong, Jiangzhou, Qingxudong, Gaotun and Getu - soluble limestone, a great deal of water, and time.
- A famous span can be wrong by 41 feet. Rainbow Bridge was accepted at 275 feet on the strength of a 1974 survey until precision laser ranging in 2007 returned 234.
- North America's longest span rests on about six feet of rock. Landscape Arch narrows to roughly six feet at its thinnest, and a 60-foot slab dropped from its underside in 1991, leaving around 180 tons of debris below.
- The tallest arch here has never been measured from the ground. Aloba Arch stands about 394 feet high in Chad's Ennedi Massif, and its accepted 250-foot span is still a photographic estimate.
- One entry carries a road, a river and power lines beneath it. Jiangzhou Natural Bridge has all three passing under its span, plus a small adobe temple holding Ming dynasty artefacts at its northern end.
1. Xianren Bridge (Fairy Bridge)
At 400 feet, give or take fifteen, Xianren Bridge outspans everything else on Earth by close to sixty feet, a margin the Natural Arch and Bridge Society describes as putting it ahead by a wide margin. The Buliu River cut it through limestone karst in northwestern Guangxi, and for most of recorded history nobody outside the surrounding valleys knew it was there. A NABS founder picked it out on satellite imagery in 2009; an expedition reached it the following October and put a rangefinder on it.
Getting there is still the hard part. The bridge lies about 40 km northwest of Fengshan as the crow flies, and the usual approach is a three-hour rubber-raft trip down the Buliu through rapids lively enough to soak everyone aboard. From the downstream side, bamboo rafts poled upriver do the same job more gently. It falls inside the Leye-Fengshan UNESCO Global Geopark, a landscape of sinkholes, gorges and cave systems that produces this kind of thing at a scale nowhere else matches.
2. Zhijin Natural Bridge
Zhijin Natural Bridge carries a 340-foot span, measured with a laser rangefinder in 2015, which makes it the second-longest arch anyone has put a firm number on. It stands in the Zhijin Cave Scenic Area of Guizhou, roughly 23 km northeast of Zhijin town and 166 km west of Guiyang, and it is one of a set of natural bridges strung along the same river gorge. That kind of density only happens where a river has been working soluble limestone for a very long time.
The scenic area is far better known for the cave it takes its name from, an enormous decorated chamber that draws most of the visitors, so the bridge tends to be treated as one feature of a wider gorge rather than the headline attraction. That is a fair reflection of how recently these Chinese spans entered the record books at all: most of the ranking above and below it was settled by a handful of survey trips inside a single decade.
3. Dachuandong Arch
Dachuandong Arch measures 300 feet across and about 135 feet from the ground to the underside of its span, proportions that read more like a tunnel mouth than a bridge. Gunter Welz measured it for NABS in 2015, during the same run of survey work that pinned down several of the other Guizhou arches on this list.
It sits near the village of Si Lian, roughly 25 miles by road from the city of Zheng'an in northern Guizhou. This is a genuinely rural corner of the province, a long way from its better-known scenic parks, and the arch sees a fraction of the traffic its size would earn it anywhere else. The surrounding country is the same soluble limestone that produced every other Chinese entry here, worked by water into caves, shafts and openings on a scale that keeps rewriting this table.
4. Landscape Arch
At 290.1 feet, measured to within a tenth of a foot in 2004, Landscape Arch is the longest natural span in North America, and the ribbon of Entrada sandstone carrying it narrows to roughly six feet at its thinnest point. Those two numbers together explain why it is watched so closely. In September 1991 a 60-foot slab dropped from the underside, leaving around 180 tons of debris on the ground; two more fell in June 1995.
The Park Service has kept the path directly beneath it off-limits ever since, though the arch itself remains an easy walk: a 0.8-mile gravel trail from the Devils Garden trailhead at the northern end of Arches National Park. Its lead over Kolob Arch is 2.7 feet, which sits inside the combined uncertainty of the two surveys, so fourth and fifth place here are better read as a coin toss than a settled result.
5. Kolob Arch
Kolob Arch was surveyed at 287.4 feet, plus or minus two, in 2006, close enough to Landscape Arch that which of the two is longer has been argued over for decades and is still not properly resolved. NABS measured both by the same method a couple of years apart and came back with a gap of under three feet, so the honest answer is that they are the same length to the precision anyone can currently claim.
Reaching them is where they part company. Landscape Arch is a stroll; Kolob sits high on a cliffside in the Kolob Canyons section of Zion National Park, and the standard approach is a fourteen-mile round trip on the La Verkin Creek Trail from Lee Pass, usually done as an overnight with a wilderness permit. It frames rock rather than open sky for much of the day, which is part of why photographs of it are so much scarcer than of its Utah rival.
6. Jiangzhou Natural Bridge
Jiangzhou Natural Bridge is the one entry here without a firm number. NABS places its span somewhere between 280 and 340 feet and declines to choose, noting that the arch's placing cannot be confirmed while the information about it conflicts. This list ranks it on the 280-foot lower bound, the figure the society will stand behind. If the upper bound is nearer the truth it belongs second in the world, and a sign at the arch itself makes precisely that claim.
It lies about 2 km east of Jiangzhou village in Guangxi, some 30 km south of Fengshan, and it is a working piece of landscape rather than a viewpoint: a paved road, a river and a line of utility cables all pass underneath it. Two old inscriptions carved into the rock nearby give the name as Jiangzhou Immortal Bridge, while a newer wooden sign calls it a natural bridge. Beneath the northern end stands a small adobe temple holding Ming dynasty artefacts.
7. Qingxudong Arch
Qingxudong Arch spans 251 feet and stands about 246 feet tall, which makes its opening very nearly as high as it is wide. That is an unusual profile among the big Chinese arches, most of which are considerably broader than they are tall. Gunter Welz measured it for NABS in 2015 with a laser rangefinder, the same instrument and the same season of fieldwork that fixed the figures for Zhijin and Dachuandong.
It is found roughly five miles southeast of the city of Dafang in Guizhou, close to the village of Yang Chang Ba. Its one-foot lead over Aloba Arch should not be taken seriously: Aloba's figure is a photographic estimate rather than a ground survey, so seventh and eighth place here could swap the moment somebody walks into the Ennedi carrying a rangefinder.
8. Aloba Arch
Aloba Arch spans 250 feet, but the number that stops people is the other one. It stands roughly 394 feet tall, so the opening is a great deal higher than it is wide and the band of rock riding above the span looks improbably slight by comparison. It is the only entry on this list outside China and the United States, and the only one standing in a desert.
It rises from the Ennedi Plateau in northeastern Chad, deep in the Sahara, with Fada the nearest town of any size. UNESCO inscribed the surrounding sandstone country as the Ennedi Massif for both its scenery and its rock art, and the landscape resembles the Colorado Plateau closely enough that it produces arches by much the same processes. Aloba's span has never been surveyed on the ground; the accepted figure comes from photographic estimation, which is why its exact placing here should be read loosely.
9. Morning Glory Natural Bridge
Morning Glory Natural Bridge measures 243 feet, a figure established by Robert Vreeland's survey work and later verified by NABS. What makes it strange is how little daylight it shows: the bridge runs almost flush against the cliff behind it, so from most angles it reads as a groove in the rock wall rather than a free-standing span, and it is entirely possible to walk up to it without registering what you are looking at.
It sits in Grandstaff Canyon just east of Moab, Utah, reached by a four-mile round trip with under 200 feet of elevation gain, one of the gentlest approaches to anything on this list. The trailhead is three miles east of Highway 191 on Highway 128, along the Colorado River. Its three-foot margin over Gaotun Natural Bridge falls within the tolerance of the two measurements, so ninth and tenth are effectively level.
10. Gaotun Natural Bridge
Gaotun Natural Bridge spans 240 feet across the Bazhou River, measured by Gunter Welz during a NABS trip led by Ray Millar in October 2010, the same month of fieldwork that produced the world-record figure for Xianren Bridge a few hundred kilometres to the west. It is the easternmost of the Chinese arches gathered here.
The bridge stands near the town of Gaotun in Liping County, in the Miao and Dong autonomous prefecture of southeastern Guizhou, and forms part of the Bazhou He Scenic Area. This is a different Guizhou from the karst towers further south: hill country of terraced valleys and Dong villages with drum towers and covered wind-and-rain bridges of their own. In a place that builds its bridges as landmarks, a 240-foot span of natural limestone is an easy thing to walk straight past.
11. Rainbow Bridge
Rainbow Bridge spans 234 feet, a figure that surprises anyone who grew up with the older one. For decades the accepted span was 275 feet, from a 1974 Bureau of Reclamation survey; precision laser ranging in 2007, applied to a strict definition of where a span begins and ends, took roughly 41 feet off it. The rock did not change, the method did, and that single remeasurement is the clearest argument for ranking a list like this on one standard rather than on whichever number is quoted most often.
It rises about 290 feet above the canyon floor in Glen Canyon, southern Utah, and is sacred to the Navajo, Hopi and several other tribes, who ask that visitors not walk beneath it. Most people arrive by boat across Lake Powell; the alternative is a long overland hike across Navajo Nation land, which requires a permit. The monument is also the National Park Service's first International Dark Sky Sanctuary.
12. Great Arch of Getu
The Great Arch of Getu closes this list at 230 feet, and only because of where the measurement stops. Taken across the front of its opening it runs to about 305 feet; the span that counts is the narrowest point of the tunnel-like passage, which sits toward the back, and that is 230. Gunter Welz took the figure with a laser rangefinder in 2013 and he and Ray Millar confirmed it on a return visit in 2015. A sign at the site gives the same 70 metres.
The arch, also known as Shuiyanba Dong or Chuangshang Cave, dominates Getu Valley National Park in Ziyun County, Guizhou, and it has a second life as a well-known sport-climbing venue, with routes running up through the opening and out across its ceiling. The cave systems alongside it hold huge colonies of swifts, which pour out at dawn and stream back at dusk.
FAQ: The World's Longest Natural Arches
What is the longest natural arch in the world?
Xianren Bridge in Guangxi, China, spans 400 feet give or take fifteen, measured by the Natural Arch and Bridge Society in 2010. It leads the second-placed arch by close to sixty feet. Reaching it takes a three-hour raft trip down the Buliu River, which is part of why so few people outside China have ever seen it.
How is the span of a natural arch measured?
Span is the horizontal distance across the opening at its narrowest point, not its widest and not its height. The distinction decides the ranking: the Great Arch of Getu measures roughly 305 feet across the front of its opening but only 230 feet where the passage pinches, and it is the 230 that counts.
Is Landscape Arch or Kolob Arch longer?
Landscape Arch, but only just. NABS surveys put it at 290.1 feet against Kolob Arch's 287.4, a gap of 2.7 feet that sits inside the combined uncertainty of the two measurements. The two have been argued over for decades, and at the precision available today they are best treated as the same length.
Which of the longest natural arches are easy to visit?
The American ones. Landscape Arch is a 0.8-mile gravel walk in Arches National Park, and Morning Glory Natural Bridge a four-mile round trip near Moab. Rainbow Bridge is usually reached by boat across Lake Powell. Kolob Arch needs a fourteen-mile hike, and the Chinese and Chadian arches take real expedition travel.
Why are so many of the longest natural arches in China?
Seven of the twelve stand in Guizhou and Guangxi, where thick beds of soluble limestone have been worked by rivers for millions of years into caves, gorges and very large natural bridges. Most were measured only in the last two decades, so the top of this ranking is a relatively recent piece of knowledge.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.