Many of us have crossed a bridge over troubled water, like the one that Simon and Garfunkel sang about, but Germany’s Kanalbrücke Magdeburg is a real rarity: a bridge over troubled water that’s also full of troubled water! It’s like a freeway overpass, only for boats instead of cars. And it’s the biggest of its kind in the world.

View The Madgeberg Water Bridge in a larger map

  • The Magdeburg Water Bridge, located about 100 miles west of Berlin, connects two different canal systems: the Elbe-Havel Canal and the Mitteland Canal. Those canals are a tiny link in a vast chain of waterways across Europe, from France and the Low Countries in the west all the way to Poland and the Baltic Sea in the east.

  • The problem for decades was the Elbe River, which lies between these two canals—and at a significantly lower elevation than either. To cross from one canal to another, boats would have to have make a 7-mile detour that included a huge “boat lift” (essentially an elevator to lower boats 60 feet into the Elbe) and then a lock to raise them back up out of the river to canal level. When water level in the Elbe was low, even this slow work-around was impossible. As far back as 1905, engineers realized that a “boat bridge” would be a much more elegant solution.

  • The Cold War-era division of Germany ended traffic on many of these waterways, but after reunification, serious work began on a better crossing. The result, €500 million and 25,000 tons of steel later, is a one-of-a kind engineering feat: a half-mile “river” floating more than 20 feet in the air over another river!

  • Strictly speaking, a “bridge” filled with water is called an aqueduct, so the Magdeburg canal crossing is technically an aqueduct, not a bridge. But it’s navigable by huge barges, unlike any other aqueduct I can think of. Let’s face it, we need a new word for whatever this is. Hack-qeduct? Sailover? Airy Canal? I await your suggestions.

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