Three Countries Bridge

Feel the deck under your feet for a moment. It is firm, but it is not perfectly still. When a group of cyclists rolls past, or the wind comes up the Rhine, the bridge answers with the faintest movement. Below you the river is wide, green-grey and fast. Gulls ride the air currents above the water. And the far bank, just over there, is another country.

This is the Three Countries Bridge, the Dreiländerbrücke in German. It links Weil am Rhein, in Germany, with the French town of Huningue on the opposite bank. It carries no cars at all. It was built only for people on foot and on bicycles. It opened in 2007, and in the years since it has become one of the simplest ways to cross a European border. You just walk.

So why three countries, when the bridge touches only two? Look upstream, to the south. A short distance away, the city of Basel spreads along both banks of the river. That is Switzerland. Close to here, in the middle of the Rhine, the borders of Germany, France and Switzerland meet at a single point. From the middle of this deck, you can see all three nations at once without turning very far.

Now look at the structure itself. A long, shallow steel arch rises above the walkway and holds the deck from above. There are no piers standing in the river. The whole crossing is made in one single span of well over two hundred metres. At the time it opened, it was counted among the longest single-span footbridges anywhere in the world. That is a surprising record for a bridge that most visitors simply stroll across.

The design came from the office of Dietmar Feichtinger, an Austrian architect based in Paris. His team is known for light, slender bridges, and you can see that idea here. The arch is low and flat rather than tall. The white steel is thin for the distance it covers. Engineers had to keep the river clear because the Rhine here is a working waterway. A row of piers would have been a problem for the boats.

And the boats are worth watching. Wait a few minutes and a long barge will probably slide beneath you. Many carry containers, gravel, or fuel, heading north towards the North Sea ports or south into Basel. The Rhine has been one of the great trade routes of Europe for centuries. From up here you hear the low hum of the engine first, and then you see the wake spread out towards both banks.

The two ends of the bridge have very different stories. On the French side, Huningue was once a fortress town. In the late seventeenth century, under King Louis the Fourteenth, the great military engineer Vauban built strong fortifications here to guard this point on the Rhine. After the wars of Napoleon, the fortress was dismantled in the years after 1815. Today you will find quiet streets, a central square, and a riverside park where those walls once stood.

That French riverside also holds an unusual sight. Near the bridge there is an artificial white-water course. Canoeists and kayakers train there, fighting through fast channels of foaming water. If you hear shouts and splashing as you reach the French end, that is probably the reason. It is a strange contrast. On one side the big river moves steadily north. Next to it, a small man-made river rushes around concrete rocks.

On the German side, Weil am Rhein has its own surprise. It is home to the Vitra Campus, a collection of buildings by some of the best-known architects of recent decades, gathered around a furniture company famous for its chairs. So this small town has become a place of pilgrimage for people who love design. The bridge fits that story well. It is a piece of modern architecture that you do not visit behind glass. You use it.

Think for a moment about what this river has meant. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Rhine between France and Germany was a hard frontier. Armies faced each other across it. Bridges in this region were blown up, rebuilt, and guarded. Crossing meant papers, checks, and suspicion. Today the two banks sit inside the Schengen area, where border controls between member states were removed. That is why nobody stops you in the middle.

So watch the people around you. A parent pushes a pram from France to Germany. A commuter on a bike crosses with a bag of groceries. A jogger runs out to the middle and turns back without thinking about it. For locals, this is not a monument. It is a daily path between a bakery on one side and a home on the other. That ordinary use is perhaps the bridge's most remarkable feature.

The light here changes a lot through the day. In the morning, the sun comes from the east, over the German bank, and the white steel looks almost silver. Late in the afternoon the light turns warm and comes low from the west, over France. On a clear day you may see hills on the horizon, the Black Forest to the north-east and the Vosges further to the west. In fog, the far end of the arch can disappear completely.

If you have time, walk the full length and back again. Cross slowly. Stop at the centre, where the arch is highest above you and the view is widest. Then look down at the water and notice how fast it moves. The Rhine runs strongly here, even on a calm day. Swimming is dangerous, so keep to the riverside paths if you want to be close to the water.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment. Put a hand on the cool rail. Listen to the river, the wind, the click of bicycle wheels on the joints of the deck. In one direction is Germany. In the other is France. Upstream, Switzerland. A few generations ago, this was a line that divided people. Now it is simply a place to walk across... and you have just done it.