The sixteen-kilometre road-and-rail link between Denmark and Sweden that dives through a tunnel, surfaces on a man-made island, and soars over the strait on cable-stayed pylons.
Engineers had been drawing bridges across the Øresund since 1865, and Denmark and Sweden had even agreed to build one in 1973 before cancelling it five years later. The binding treaty came in 1991; construction ran from 1995 and turned up sixteen unexploded wartime bombs on the seabed. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden opened the link on 1 July 2000, ending centuries in which the only way over was by boat. Today some 22,000 vehicles a day cross a structure with a motorway on its roof and a railway in its belly.
Leaving Copenhagen you do not climb onto the bridge at all — you go under it. The motorway dips into the Drogden tunnel, four kilometres of road and rail laid along the seabed in twenty prefabricated concrete sections, each 176 metres long, weighing 55,000 tonnes and among the largest ever cast. A tunnel was chosen here because a bridge would have stood in the flight path of Copenhagen Airport and narrowed a shipping lane that must stay open in any weather. Then daylight returns and you are on Peberholm, "Pepper Islet" — four kilometres of land that did not exist before 1995, raised out of the mud dredged for the tunnel and named as a joke to pair with the real island of Saltholm, "Salt Islet", just to the north.
Only then does the road climb onto the bridge: 7,845 metres of it, really two structures in one, with four motorway lanes on an upper deck and two railway tracks sealed in a steel box directly underneath. The design came out of a competition in 1992 that drew entries from Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster, and was won by a team including the Danish architect Georg K. S. Rotne. His cable-stayed centre span leaves 57 metres of clear air over the shipping channel, hung from pylons 204 metres tall. Somewhere out there you pass from Denmark into Sweden without noticing anything: the border sits about 900 metres short of the first pylon, which puts both towers, and two thirds of the bridge, on Swedish ground.
Nobody planted anything on Peberholm. The two countries agreed to leave the new island bare and see what arrived on the wind and the water, and roughly 600 plant species have turned up on their own; a 2025 survey counted a record 45 breeding bird species. You cannot go there — biologists get one visit a year — so it simply slides past the window. What the crossing really built was a region: some 23,000 people now sleep on one side of the water and work on the other, living in Sweden on Danish wages.
The making of Øresund Bridge
The high bridge
A 490-metre cable-stayed span slung from pylons 204 metres tall, leaving 57 metres of clear air beneath for the ships of the Flintrännan channel.
Peberholm
"Pepper Islet": four kilometres of land that did not exist in 1995, left deliberately unplanted and since colonised by some 600 plant species on their own.
The Drogden tunnel
Four kilometres of road and rail laid along the seabed in twenty concrete sections — sunk here so the crossing would not block Copenhagen Airport's flight path.
Georg K. S. Rotne
The Danish architect on the team whose two-level design — motorway above, railway below — beat entries from Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster in 1992.
Bron/Broen
The Nordic noir series that opens with a body laid exactly on the border line up on the deck, half in each country. It sold to over 100 countries and drew six remakes.
The daily crossing
Four trains an hour each way, forty minutes city centre to city centre, and about 23,000 cross-border commuters — the bridge turned two countries into one labour market.
Broloppet, the Bridge Run
The only days anyone has legally crossed on foot: a half marathon run in 2000, 2010 and again in June 2025, when 40,333 runners had the deck to themselves.
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