Crews drilling the world's tallest bridge hit an aquifer and turned the problem into a 984-foot artificial waterfall.
The Huajiang Canyon Bridge in China now features a cascading water display.
China holds 50 of the 54 tallest bridges on Earth. The Huajiang Canyon Bridge sits 2,051 feet (625 meters) above the river below.
It runs 2,890 meters (9,482 feet) end to end, hung from a 1,420-meter (4,660-foot) main span between two towers.
The bridge takes the height record from the Duge Bridge, which crosses the same river about 200 kilometers (120 miles) upstream.
The road it carries, the Liuzhi-Anlong Expressway, threads through Guizhou, one of China's poorest and most isolated provinces.
From Engineering Challenge to Tourist Attraction
Construction of the huge bridge started in early 2022, and by September 2025, work on it was finished.
It helps locals cross the canyon in a minute, down from roughly 70 minutes using old mountain passes and ferries.
Crews boring the tunnel at the bridgehead hit a flow of karst groundwater, no surprise in a province built on hollowed-out limestone.
Worried it might work away at the structure over time, the team penned it up instead of pumping it out.
The reservoir they built to catch the water holds 4,000 cubic meters (140,000 cubic feet).
It supplies the rest area and waters farmland and orchards on the Guanling side of the canyon.
The rest gets pumped to the middle of the bridge and let loose, spilling into a misty waterfall about 984 feet (300 meters) wide that falls more than 2,000 feet (606 meters) toward the river.
After dark, lasers light the cascade to pull in crowds.
Chinese state media has called it the world's highest artificial waterfall. The spray pressure can be pushed to take its height to nearly 100 meters (330 feet).
A New Tourist Hotspot
Roughly 300,000 people visited the Huajiang Canyon Bridge during the Chinese New Year in February, with more than 70,000 vehicles driving across it.
Visitors can take a glass elevator to a coffeehouse on top of one of the towers, 800 meters (2,625 feet) above the valley floor.
Bungee jumping and paragliding rigs are built into the structure.
Between 1929 and 2001, America's Royal Gorge Bridge was the world's highest bridge, but it was overtaken by the Liuguanghe Bridge in 2001.
Since then, China has been home to the world's highest bridges.
