MILLAU, Dec 14: As air force jets screamed overhead, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the world's tallest bridge Tuesday, a stunning masterpiece of engineering that will carry drivers 270 metres (885 feet) above ground.
He spoke of the viaduct, whose highest point soars to 343 metres - higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris - over the river Tarn in southern France, as a monument to French daring and enterprise.
Built to schedule in three years, it was commissioned in order to open up a new north-south route and ease pressure on one of the nation's most notorious motorway bottlenecks.
Before an audience of around 1,000 people, including the viaduct's British architect Norman Foster, Chirac unveiled a plaque by the largest of its seven pillars. "The Millau viaduct takes its place among our most shining works of civil engineering. It brilliantly embodies the verve of our research and technology," he said.
"The French people are rightly proud of the feats accomplished here - feats which speak for France. A modern France; an enterprising, successful France; a France which invests in its future."
The bridge, stretching 2.46 kilometres (1.6 miles) between two plateaux in the Massif Central mountain range, opens to traffic Thursday, easing pressure on the saturated Rhone valley to the east, used by lorry drivers and tourists bound for the Mediterranean and Spain.
Like a taut thread pierced by a line of needles, the silhouette dominates the countryside for miles around and has been praised as a classic marriage of aesthetics and science.
"A work of man must fuse with nature. The pillars had to look almost organic, like they had grown from the earth," said Foster, whose other works include the renovation of the Reichstag in Berlin and Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong.
"The bridge could not look as if it had been tacked onto the scenery. It had to rise out of the landscape with the delicacy of a butterfly." The viaduct is not only the world's tallest - outstripping the 282-metre towers of Japan's Akashi Kaikyo bridge - but is also the longest multi-span cable-stayed bridge.
The Tatara Ohashi bridge, also in Japan, is 1.48 kilometres long. The highest bridge in the world - measured by distance from ground to deck - remains the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, United States, at 320 metres above the river Arkansas.
Unusually for such a large infrastructure project in France, its 390 million euro (520 million dollar) cost was financed entirely by the private sector, with the construction giant Eiffage getting the right to collect tolls for 75 years in return. -AFP
