This is the Aqueduct of Segovia, which was probably built during the second half of the 1st Century AD, and is one of the most significant and best-preserved Roman monuments in Spain.

Technically, this is just the bridge part of a much longer aqueduct which carries water to Segovia from 17 kilometres away. It is only when the aqueduct crosses Segovia’s Plaza Azoguejo that it really becomes a sight to behold. This ancient engineering masterpiece is comprised of 167 arches reaching up to 28.5 metres!

Some of the height is obvious in the Google Image thanks to the fantastic shadow, but here’s some ground level photos that give you a good sense of scale, and here’s another that conveys how incredibly old this structure is.

Thanks to Ignacio Sanz.

Connecting the Danish islands of Zealand and Funen is the Great Belt Fixed Link, another example of a confusing bridge / tunnel mash-up¹.

Starting on Funen at the Western end we have a 6611m bridge that carries both road and rail.

This bridge then abruptly ends at the tiny island of Sprogø, the site of a former prison used for women deemed “pathologically promiscuous”! During the bridge’s construction Sprogø’s landmass was quadrupled in size.

Here the road and rail tracks diverge, with the rail track diving under a tunnel to the North, while the road continues along the 6790m Eastern bridge.

This Eastern bridge has a single suspended span (without ground support) of 1624m, making it the second longest suspended span in the world. It would actually have been the title holder, at least temporarily, but for a delay in construction which meant that the longer-spanned Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge was completed first.

Prior to the construction of both the Great Belt and Akashi-Kaikyo bridges, the longest span title was held by the Humber Bridge in England, wich reigned from its construction in 1981 until 1998.

Everyone’s favourite Humber fact is that the perfectly vertical towers are actually 36mm² further apart at the top than they are at the bottom, due to the curvature of the earth!

Wikipedia has the complete list of largest suspension bridges and pages on the Great Belt, Sprogø and the Humber Bridge.

Thanks to Jonathan Rawle, Tobias Hader and Cyan

In the past we’ve featured some incredible feats of engineering in service of canals and their traffic, but perhaps none as elegant as the Barton Swing Aqueduct, England.

Designed by Edward Leader Williams¹ and first used in 1893, the aqueduct carries the Bridgewater Canal over the Manchester Ship Canal. If a tall vessel needs to pass underneath on the MSC, the 71m-long iron trough swings through 90° to allow them clear passage.

Gates at either end of the bridge hold around 800 tonnes of water in place while it swings, and another set of gates on either bank hold back the rest of the canal.

Furthermore, this is actually a double swing bridge, as the Barton Swing Bridge pivots on the same purpose-built island simultaneously. How cool is that?

More about the Barton Swing Aqueduct, the Manchester Ship Canal and Edward Leader Williams at Wikipedia.

See our other posts on European Barge Lifting, A Canal Across Germany, the Corinth Canal, the Caen Hill Flight and the Saint Lawrence Seaway for more impressive canal engineering.

As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 – see you all next year!

Today we’re posting a roundup of the most interesting ways Europe has employed to get canal barges up-and-over stuff. The simplest method is of course a bridge, of which you can see several excellent examples in our previous post, A Canal Across Germany. However sometimes barges need to traverse obstacles that a bridge cannot cross, and Europeland has employed several ingenious solutions to particular geographic problems.

Between Saint-Louis and Arzviller in France, a system was required that enabled the canal to cross the Vosges Mountains. The solution is the Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane, a single structure that replaced 17 locks upon its completion in 1969.

Basically, vessels float into a gigantic bathtub which is then hauled up a 108.7 metre-long ramp at 41°. This vertical change of 44.6 m used to take 8 to 13 hours to traverse, but can now be achieved in just 4 minutes.

Such canal inclined planes are actually not uncommon, but the Saint-Louis-Arzviller example is probably the steepest. In Belgium, engineers have a more traditionally modest angle, but over a much greater distance – the Ronquières inclined plane climbs 68 m vertically, but is nearly 1.5 kilometres long! This time there are two giant bathtubs (actually known as caissons), and the journey takes a much more leisurely 45 minutes to complete.

Seemingly on a roll, Belgian engineers are also responsible for the Strépy-Thieu boat lift – an absolutely monumental machine that dispenses entirely with inclines, and just lifts the barges straight up and down in two counterbalanced caissons¹. The difference between water levels is 73.2 metres, meaning this is officially the world’s tallest boat lift. At least until the new one at the Three Gorges dam is finished anyway…

We already posted the world’s steepest flight of locks, the Caen Hill Flight, so instead here’s the Foxton Locks – a set of ten canal locks consisting of two “staircases” each of five locks. Because the Foxton locks can hold many boats at once, they’ve become a very popular location for Gongoozling – the art of watching activity on UK canals. No, seriously – there’s a Wikipedia page on Gongoozlers and everything.

The best thing about the Foxton locks however, is that we can actually see a barge in one of the locks.

The UK also has two working boat lifts – the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire, England, and the awesome Falkirk Wheel in Scotland (which is unfortunately not available on Google Earth or Maps, but Microsoft’s Live Local has a good image of it²).

Although both rely on Archimedes’ Principle, the Falkirk wheel is unique as it is the only rotating boat lift in the world. Barges enter the wheel at the ends of two opposing 15 metre arms, which then rotate through 180° in five and a half minutes, using only the energy it takes to boil 8 kettles!

Read more at Wikipedia about the Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane, the Ronquières inclined plane, the Strépy-Thieu boat lift, the Foxton Locks, the Anderton Boat Lift, and the Falkirk Wheel.

Or, if you’re really interested, “Canal lifts and inclines of the world” by Hans-Joachim Uhlemann seems to be definitive book on this subject.

Thanks to Jel and others.