Two giant hands, 1,400 metres up
A pair of enormous weathered hands rises out of the forest in the Ba Na Hills above Da Nang and holds a golden walkway in the air. The Golden Bridge — Cầu Vàng — opened in June 2018, and within weeks it had done something no Vietnamese building had managed before: it became a photograph the whole world recognised.
The bridge is 150 metres long, carried on eight spans, and sits more than 1,400 metres above sea level. From the deck the ground falls away into cloud, and on a clear morning you can see all the way to the coast at Da Nang.
The hands are not stone
They look like weathered granite pulled out of the mountain. They are fibreglass and wire mesh over a steel frame, deliberately “aged” with moss-green staining and cracks so they read as ancient rather than new. It is a piece of theatre, and it is honest about being one — the effect works because the material never pretends at close range.
Lobelia chrysanthemums are planted along the latticed sides of the deck, so the walkway is edged in purple against the gold.
Who built it, and why
The bridge was designed by TA Landscape Architecture, based in Ho Chi Minh City, with Vu Viet Anh as principal designer. The client was the Sun Group, and construction ran from July 2017 to April 2018.
The purpose is more practical than the photographs suggest. The Ba Na Hills resort needed to move visitors between the cable car station and the gardens without sending them up a steep incline, and the bridge loops back nearly on itself to do it. So this is a piece of circulation infrastructure that happens to be a monument — which is a large part of why it works. It had a job.
Getting there is half of it
You reach the bridge by cable car from the foot of the mountain, and the ride is genuinely part of the experience — the system holds several world records for length and elevation gain, and it takes you up through forest and cloud in about fifteen minutes.
At the top is the rest of Ba Na Hills: a full French-style village with a square, a church and a funicular, built as a resort. It is unashamedly a theme park, and visitors either enjoy that or resent having climbed a mountain to find one. Knowing which you are before you buy the ticket saves the day.
The hills themselves have the history the village imitates. The French established a hill station here from 1919, precisely because it was fifteen degrees cooler than the coast, and the ruins of some of those villas are still in the forest.
How to visit without queuing for the photograph
This is the practical part, and it is the difference between a good morning and a bad one.
- Take the first cable car of the day. By eleven the bridge is shoulder to shoulder, and the photograph everyone came for becomes impossible.
- Check the weather at altitude, not in Da Nang. The summit generates its own cloud. A clear day on the coast can mean thirty metres of visibility at the top — beautiful in its own way, but not what you booked.
- Bring a layer. It is reliably ten to fifteen degrees cooler up there, which surprises people who left a beach in shorts.
- Allow most of a day. The bridge itself takes ten minutes to walk. The rest of the mountain takes considerably longer, and rushing back down is a waste of the cable car fare.
What one bridge did for a city
It is worth being clear about the effect, because it is unusual. Before 2018, Da Nang was for most foreign visitors an airport on the way to Hoi An — a place you landed and left. The Golden Bridge changed that in a single season, and the city has since built out a hotel and beach strip on the strength of being a destination rather than a transfer.
The design has also been copied across Asia, generally badly, which is the clearest measure of how well the original works. The imitations tend to reproduce the hands and forget the reason for them: the walkway had somewhere to go.
Where it fits in a Vietnam trip
The Golden Bridge is a half-day from Da Nang, which puts it within easy reach of the whole central coast. Hoi An is forty minutes south, and the imperial city of Hue is ninety minutes north over the Hai Van Pass — a stretch of road worth taking deliberately rather than through the tunnel.
For the rest of the country, see our guide to fascinating travel spots in Vietnam, and Hoi An, a tailor-made day in Vietnam for the town next door. Further north lies Ha Long Bay, and inland from the coast, the Dark Cave and Son Doong, the largest cave passage on earth.
And since the central coast is where Vietnamese cooking is at its most distinctive, take Vietnamese food from Hanoi to Saigon with you.
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