The World’s Longest Pier
The town of Progreso, Mexico, sits on a limestone shelf that falls away extremely gradually as it gets further out to sea. As a result, when they built a pier to allow cruise ships to dock here, it had to be long. Really long.
Measuring a phenomenal 6.5 kilometers (4 miles), this is the world’s longest pier.
The original pier was completed in 1942, and despite being little more than a two-lane highway, is actually quite nice looking seen from the beach. In this satellite shot you can clearly see where the original construction ends, and the more recent one begins.1
Cruise ships dock here for a day or two to allow the tourists to visit some of the nearby archaeological sites, and we can see there’s one berthed here at the moment. Tourists need to take a bus to shore, which takes nearly 10 minutes!
The pier also plays a major part in the local container industry - we can see loads of them stacked on the pier - and there’s also a tanker here just now too.
For more long piers, see our previous posts on England’s 2.1 km Southend Pier (the world’s longest pleasure pier) and Australia’s 1.8 km Busselton Jetty2.
Thanks to cboone and Michael.
-
For those of you who care about these things, yes it does look rather like the more recent part of the “pier” isn’t suspended over the water, which would technically make this part, er… a wharf? However this makes things far too complex, so we’re sticking with pier. ↩
-
Confusingly, the Busselton Jetty is the longest wooden pier in the southern hemisphere, but Australians seem to call them jetties. ↩
”