The New Little Belt Bridge

The beautiful architect-designed suspension bridge over the Little Belt is in reality not so new anymore. On October 21, 2020, the bridge became 50 years old.

Its creation cost several human lives, it was more than twice as expensive as expected - but it also created new times and countless stories.

The story of the construction

The new Lillebæltsbro was built between 1965 and 1970 and was inaugurated on 21 October 1970. After that, the new bridge relieved a large part of the road traffic from The Old Little Belt Bridge.

The bridge has 6 lanes, is 1700 meters long and the passage height under the bridge is 42 meters. It was built as a suspension bridge, making it possible to reduce the number of bridge piers in the belt to two. At the time, the bridge cost 265 million kroner to build. This corresponds to approximately NOK 2 billion today.

In the post-war years, there was a sharp increase in car traffic, which the Old Little Belt Bridge could not keep up with. From a political point of view, they wanted to create better mobility and economic growth throughout Denmark, and therefore the state initiated an extensive construction of motorways and bridges throughout the country. The first step was to connect Funen and Jutland, which enabled the further construction of motorways up through Jutland. This paved the way for the later connection across the Great Belt and thereby a coherent motorway network in Denmark.

The architect behind The New Little Belt Bridge, Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen, was educated at the Art Academy in Copenhagen's department of furniture art and space equipment. In collaboration with his partner Peter Hvidt, he has carried out work within furniture and interior design, buildings and consulting assignments on large bridge facilities, including the New Little Belt Bridge.

The new Little Belt Bridge came to mark a significant stage of development in modern suspension bridge design, and it came to contain several new innovative solutions. Several of these set new standards for later bridge construction, both in Denmark and internationally.

Updated by: Destination Triangle - VisitFredericia | turisme@fredericia.dk