Crossing the Rio-Antirrio bridge

Next step: the Peloponnese, woohoo!

It has long been a dream for us (Saul & Caitríona) to return to the Peloponnese where we went on our first holiday together in 1997 💜

The first step was to cross from mainland northwest Greece to the Peloponnese, over the Rio Antirrio bridge. This bridge is an incredible feat of engineering, built as it is over an earthquake fault line. This body of water between Rio and Antirrio is also very deep and, in addition to that, the waterbed is silt-based, so it proved impossible to built on top of it. What they opted to do instead was to build one of the world’s longest cable-stayed bridges. The suspended deck, the bit you drive (or walk!) over, is almost 2.9km long and there are four huge pylons from which the deck is suspended. Usually in these types of bridges, there are two pylons.

Construction of the bridge started in 1999 and was completed just days before the opening of the Greek Olympics in 2004.

This is a fascinating documentary about the construction of the bridge:

And here’s a clip to our own trip across said bridge:

And now we are on the Peloponnese!