Florence's Ponte Vecchio is a newcomer here. Completed in 1345, it misses the bottom of this list by more than seven centuries. These fourteen crossings run from 3,326 years old down to 1,421, across eight countries and three continents, and each earns its place on two rules. First, its birthday has to be known: a bridge dated only to the Roman period cannot be ranked at all, which is why Provence's lovely Pont Flavien is absent — its inscription names the man who paid for it but never the year, and scholars have placed it anywhere from 12 BC to the AD 70s. Second, it has to stand on substantially its own stone and still be open to walk across. That costs us Verona's Ponte Pietra, rebuilt in 1957 from arches recovered out of the Adige, and Suzhou's Baodai Bridge, a Tang-dynasty crossing replaced wholesale in 1446. Turkey's Karamagara Bridge would have ranked high; it now lies under a reservoir.
14 Oldest Bridges in the World (2026)
The record The oldest bridge in the world is the Arkadiko Bridge, in Greece — 3,326 years, age. Source: Wikipedia (Ca. 1300-1190 BC, LHIII) / Structurae. Verified .
Oldest Bridges in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Oldest Bridges
- The two oldest bridges on Earth are about a kilometre apart — Arkadiko and its neighbour Petrogephyri sit on the same Bronze Age road in the Greek Argolid, and both are still used by local farmers after roughly 3,300 years.
- The Mycenaeans built these bridges before the true arch had been invented. They used corbelling instead, stacking each course of stone a little further inward than the last until the two sides met overhead — no mortar, and no keystone.
- The Guinness record-holder is not the oldest bridge on this list. Guinness recognises Izmir's Caravan Bridge as the oldest datable bridge still in use, at about 850 BC — but that date comes from identifying the stream beneath it with the river Homer was said to be born beside, and scholars now put the surviving stonework many centuries later.
- Iran's Old Bridge of Dezful was built by Roman prisoners of war. Shapur I had just captured the emperor Valerian in battle, and he put Roman engineering skill to work — which is why a Sasanian bridge in Khuzestan stands on unmistakably Roman arches.
- China was roughly seven centuries ahead of Europe on the open-spandrel arch. Li Chun pierced the shoulders of the Anji Bridge with smaller arches around AD 605 to save stone and let floods pass through rather than push against it.
- Across the 274 metres of channel it carries, the Pont du Gard drops only about two and a half centimetres — a gradient the Romans held without a single instrument we would recognise today.
1. Arkadiko Bridge
At 3,326 years old, the Arkadiko Bridge is the oldest crossing on Earth that people still use. It carries a Mycenaean road through the hills of the Argolid in the Peloponnese, built around 1300 BC from vast unworked limestone blocks stacked without a drop of mortar. The technique is corbelling: each course juts a little further inward than the one beneath until the two sides meet overhead, forming a narrow pointed culvert rather than a true rounded arch. It is a solution from before the arch was invented, and it has outlasted almost everything built since.
The bridge is about 22 metres long and four metres high, with a roadway just wide enough for a chariot — which is what it was sized for. It belonged to a military road network linking Mycenae and Tiryns to the coast, and local farmers still walk and drive livestock over it. It is not quite alone. Three more Mycenaean bridges survive on the same road, and one of them, Petrogephyri, still carries a farm track a kilometre to the west — but Arkadiko is the best preserved and the most fully surveyed of them, and it is the bridge the whole Bronze Age network is dated from.
2. Caravan Bridge
At a conservatively dated 2,226 years, the Caravan Bridge in Izmir carries a reputation far larger than its modest single arch. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest datable bridge in the world still in use and gives it a date of about 850 BC, which would place it three centuries before the Roman republic. That figure, however, rests on identifying the stream beneath it with the ancient Meles, the river tradition associates with Homer.
Modern scholarship is more cautious, attributing the surviving slab-stone structure to the Hellenistic or Roman periods, with elements dating from as early as the second century BC. We rank it on that conservative reading rather than the traditional one, which still leaves it among the oldest crossings anywhere. It sits in a green pocket of the modern city, and it carried the caravan traffic that gave it its name into Smyrna for most of recorded history.
3. Ponte Milvio
At 2,135 years, the Ponte Milvio is the oldest surviving bridge in Rome by date of construction, though the Pons Fabricius, next on this list, keeps rather more of its original stone. The censor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus raised a crossing in stone here in 109 BC, replacing an earlier timber one, to carry the Via Flaminia over the Tiber at the northern approach to the city — the road every traveller from the north had to use.
That made it strategic, and in AD 312 it became the site of the battle that redirected European history: Constantine defeated Maxentius here, and Rome began its turn toward Christianity. Three of the central arches are still Scaurus's Roman work; Giuseppe Valadier rebuilt the arches nearest the banks in 1805 and added the neoclassical tower that guards the northern end. Traffic moved to the newer Ponte Flaminio in 1951, and since 1978 the old bridge has belonged to walkers.
4. Pons Fabricius
At 2,088 years, the Pons Fabricius is the most complete piece of Roman engineering still doing its original job. Built in 62 BC to link the left bank of the Tiber to Tiber Island, it has stood essentially unaltered ever since — two wide arches of tufa and peperino faced in travertine, with a small relieving arch above the central pier to let floodwater through. Romans have walked over it continuously for more than two thousand years.
It takes its name from Lucius Fabricius, the commissioner of roads who built it, and inscriptions cut into the parapet still record the fact. Locals know it as the Ponte dei Quattro Capi, the bridge of the four heads, after the weathered four-faced herms standing on its balustrade. It remains the shortest and most direct way onto Tiber Island on foot, which is precisely why it has never needed replacing.
5. Puente Romano de Mérida
At 2,051 years, the Puente Romano de Mérida is not only one of the oldest bridges standing but the longest the Romans left us. It was raised with the colony of Emerita Augusta itself in 25 BC, under Augustus, and runs some 790 metres across the Guadiana on around sixty granite arches, using a mid-river island as a natural staging point. Walking its full length takes a good ten minutes.
The bridge has been patched across two millennia — by the Visigoths in the seventh century, by Philip II in 1610, and again after seventeen arches were destroyed during the Napoleonic wars. Through all of it the Roman alignment held. Traffic moved to the modern Lusitania Bridge in 1991, leaving the old crossing to walkers, and it now forms the spine of a UNESCO-listed archaeological ensemble that includes Mérida's theatre and amphitheatre.
6. Pont Julien
At 2,029 years, the Pont Julien is the best-preserved bridge on the Via Domitia, the road the Romans drove through southern Gaul to connect Italy with Spain. Finished in 3 BC, it steps across the Calavon near Bonnieux on three arches of pale limestone, the central one noticeably larger than its neighbours, with two openings pierced through the flanking piers so floodwater can pass rather than push.
Those flood openings are the reason it is still here: the Calavon is a river that can rise violently, and the design gives it somewhere to go. The bridge carried ordinary road traffic until 2005, when a new crossing was built upstream specifically to spare it, and it now serves walkers and cyclists on the Véloroute du Calavon. Set among Luberon vineyards with no modern clutter around it, it is one of the most photographed Roman structures in France.
7. Ponte di Tiberio
At 2,005 years, the Ponte di Tiberio has been the front door to Rimini for two millennia. Begun under Augustus and completed under Tiberius between AD 14 and 21, it spans the Marecchia on five arches of hard Istrian limestone, and it marks the point where the Via Emilia begins its long run northwest across the plain toward Piacenza.
Its survival is close to miraculous. Retreating armies have tried to bring it down more than once and failed, and the bridge shows the scars at its San Giuliano end. The Roman engineers set the breakwater buttresses aslant the bridge's axis so the current meets stone edge-on rather than flat, and made each arch a little wider toward the centre. It was given over to pedestrians in 2020, and the water basin beside it now mirrors the arches, making it the most photographed spot in the city.
8. Pont du Gard
At 1,976 years, the Pont du Gard is the tallest aqueduct the Romans ever built and the most famous bridge on this list. Raised around the middle of the first century AD, it carried the water supply for Nîmes across the Gardon on three tiers of arches stacked 48.8 metres high. The stone was cut so precisely that the whole structure was assembled without mortar, friction and gravity alone holding blocks the size of small cars in place.
What makes it a marvel is not the height but the gradient. Across the 274 metres of channel it carries, the fall from one end to the other is about two and a half centimetres — a tolerance that would be demanding with a laser level and is astonishing with Roman instruments. A road deck was added alongside in 1743, and visitors today walk across it and, at certain times, along the water conduit itself. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.
9. Roman Bridge of Chaves
At 1,926 years, the Roman Bridge of Chaves still carries people over the Tâmega in northern Portugal, as it was built to do under Trajan around AD 100. The town was then Aquae Flaviae, a spa settlement on the road between Braga and Astorga, and the bridge was the reason the road went that way at all — the hot springs that drew the Romans there still surface a short walk from its northern end.
What sets it apart from every other bridge here is what stands on the deck: two original Roman milestone columns, still in place, carved with inscriptions honouring the emperors and recording the distances to Braga and to Roman León. One of them, the Padrão dos Povos, notes that ten local communities paid for the work themselves. Most ancient bridges have to be dated by argument. This one carries its own paperwork.
10. Alcántara Bridge
At 1,920 years, the Alcántara Bridge is the boldest thing the Romans built over water. Completed between AD 104 and 106 under Trajan, it leaps the Tagus gorge in western Spain on six arches, the two central ones rising far higher than the rest to clear a river that runs deep in rock. A triumphal arch stands at the midpoint of the deck, and a small temple sits at the southern approach.
The temple carries a dedication naming Gaius Julius Lacer as the architect of all three structures, a rare piece of direct credit from the ancient world, along with his claim to have built a bridge that would last as long as the world itself. Lacer was buried in that temple, and his tomb is still there. The crossing has been damaged in successive wars and repaired in 1860 and again in 1969. Its Arabic name, Al-Qantara, simply means the bridge.
11. Ponte Sant'Angelo
At 1,892 years, the Ponte Sant'Angelo is the grandest approach to any building in Rome. Hadrian completed it in AD 134 for one purpose: to carry mourners from the Campus Martius to his own mausoleum on the far bank, the drum-shaped mass now known as Castel Sant'Angelo. Three of its five arches are the emperor's original work, faced in travertine and spanning the Tiber in a long, low, deliberate line.
What everyone photographs came fifteen centuries later. In the 1660s Bernini designed the ten angels that line the parapet, each carrying an instrument of the Passion, turning a funerary causeway into a processional route toward St Peter's. Two of the angels Bernini carved himself were judged too fine to leave out in the weather and are kept in the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte; the ones on the bridge are copies. It is pedestrian-only, and best at dusk.
12. Cendere Bridge
At 1,826 years, the Cendere Bridge carries the road toward Mount Nemrut across a deep gorge in southeastern Turkey on a single soaring arch of ninety-two stone blocks. It was built around AD 200 by four Commagene cities in honour of the emperor Septimius Severus, and it remains the second-largest single-arch bridge the Romans are known to have left standing.
Its most telling feature is what is missing. Four columns were raised at the ends of the deck, one each for Severus, his wife Julia Domna and their two sons Caracalla and Geta — but Caracalla had his brother condemned to oblivion after his death, and Geta's column was taken away, leaving three where there should be four. It is political history you can count on your fingers. Cars now use a newer bridge five hundred metres east, so the Roman span is crossed on foot, which is by far the better way to see it.
13. Old Bridge of Dezful
At 1,766 years, the Old Bridge of Dezful is the oldest bridge in Iran still carrying its city's traffic, and the oldest on this list built outside the Roman and Greek worlds. It was raised across the Dez around AD 260 under the Sasanian king Shapur I, and it stitches the two halves of Dezful together over roughly 385 metres and fourteen spans.
Its construction is one of antiquity's better stories. Shapur had just defeated and captured the Roman emperor Valerian, and the labour and engineering expertise for the bridge came from Roman prisoners of war — which is why a Sasanian bridge in Khuzestan stands on unmistakably Roman arches. The result is a genuine hybrid, Persian in purpose and Roman in technique. It has taken flood damage and wartime damage across seventeen centuries and been repaired each time, and it has been a listed national monument since 1932.
14. Anji Bridge
At 1,421 years, the Anji Bridge in Hebei is the oldest bridge in China and the oldest open-spandrel stone arch anywhere. The engineer Li Chun completed it for the Sui dynasty around AD 605, throwing a single shallow segmental arch more than thirty-seven metres across the Xiao River — a far flatter curve than the semicircles the Romans favoured, and a far harder thing to make stand.
The innovation that gives it its name is the pair of smaller arches pierced through the spandrel at each end. They cut the bridge's weight, save stone, and let floodwater through instead of damming it against the abutments, and Europe would not build anything comparable for roughly seven centuries. Also known as the Zhaozhou Bridge, it is an ASCE International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, still open to walk across, and its stone balustrades carry some of the finest Sui-period dragon carving anywhere.
FAQ: The World's Oldest Bridges
What is the oldest bridge in the world?
The Arkadiko Bridge in the Argolid region of Greece, built by the Mycenaeans around 1300 BC and roughly 3,326 years old. It is a corbel-arch crossing of unmortared limestone blocks, raised for chariot traffic on a Bronze Age military road, and local farmers still walk and drive livestock over it today.
Can you still walk across all of these bridges?
Yes, and that is a deliberate rule of this ranking: every entry still stands on substantially its own stone and is still open to cross on foot. It is also why some very old crossings are missing. Turkey's Karamagara Bridge now lies beneath a reservoir, and Padua's Ponte San Lorenzo survives intact but buried below street level.
Why are so many of the oldest bridges Roman?
The Romans built in cut stone at enormous scale, engineered for permanence rather than for one generation, and spread that practice across three continents of road network. Add dry Mediterranean sites and two thousand years of continuous reuse and repair, and far more Roman bridges have survived than from any other ancient culture.
What is the oldest bridge outside Europe?
Iran's Old Bridge of Dezful, raised around AD 260 under the Sasanian king Shapur I and built partly with captured Roman labour, which is why it stands on Roman-looking arches. China's Anji Bridge of about AD 605 is the oldest in East Asia and the oldest open-spandrel stone arch found anywhere.
Why isn't the Ponte Vecchio or Charles Bridge on this list?
Because they are comparatively young. Florence's Ponte Vecchio was completed in 1345 and Prague's Charles Bridge was begun in 1357, which leaves both of them more than seven centuries short of the fourteenth entry here. Fame and age are different things, and this ranking measures only the second one.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.