AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The New Little Belt Bridge (Danish: Den nye Lillebæltsbro) is the great grey suspension span that stitches mainland Jutland to the island of Funen across the Little Belt strait. Opened by King Frederik IX on 21 October 1970 after five years of construction, it carries three motorway lanes in each direction on the E20 and, at 1,700 metres long with a 600-metre main span, was a landmark of modern Danish engineering. Unlike most sights, this one is experienced from a distance and from below: from clifftops, beaches, the harbour and the water, where its towers and cables frame the strait.↗↗
Set beside the town of Middelfart, the bridge shares the strait with the elegant 1935 Old Little Belt Bridge, and together the two give the area its nickname, "the city of bridges." For visitors the bridge is the starting point for a whole landscape: Denmark's largest marine nature park, the porpoise-rich Little Belt, coastal hiking trails and the once-a-year festival that turns the grass under the span into a concert stage.↗
A bridge built to free a country
By the 1960s the cheerful single-lane 1935 bridge could no longer cope with Denmark's booming car traffic. The state's answer was the New Little Belt Bridge, built between 1965 and 1970 to relieve congestion and form the first link in a growing motorway spine running up through Jutland—the stepping stone that would later make the Great Belt crossing and a nationwide motorway network possible. It was expensive and hard-won, costing some 265 million kroner at the time (roughly 2 billion kroner today) and claiming lives during construction, but it delivered a six-lane, toll-free crossing over one of the busiest straits in Danish waters.
