Handpicked experience · Da Nang
Da Nang, Vietnam
A day on a ridge the French built to escape the heat and then abandoned, where a bridge held up by two artificially aged hands sits under cloud for much of the year.
Enjoy the view of Da Nang's mountains from Linh Ung Pagoda and see its 27m high Buddha statue in person.
Be transported to a completely different country when you reach Ba Na Hills' French Village.
Get to each destination via Ba Na Hills' cable car, the world's longest non-stop single track cable car line.
Fill yourself up with over 100 kinds of food at Ba Na Hills' buffet restaurant.
Meet Queen Elizabeth, Prince William, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge at the Wax Statue Museum.
The Golden Bridge, which was officially inaugurated in June 2018 in Ba Na, was also voted by TIME magazine as one of the “Top 10 best destinations of the world 2018” and admired by The Guardian as “The world’s most impressive pedestrians’ bridge”.
A ridge settled in 1919 for its temperature alone
Foundations and walls of an abandoned colonial settlement
A crossing designed to be recognised at a glance
A cable car gaining more than a kilometre of height in one run
Air roughly ten degrees cooler than the coast
A complex spread over several levels
A day from Da Nang up to Ba Na Hills, the resort complex on a ridge at about fourteen hundred metres, reached by cable car and built around the Golden Bridge and a replica French village.
This ridge was developed by the French in 1919 as a hill station: a settlement built purely because the temperature at altitude is roughly ten degrees below the coast, at a time when that was the only available air conditioning.
Around two hundred villas went up, along with the road and the infrastructure to supply them, and the whole thing was abandoned after 1945. For half a century it was ruins in the forest.
What exists now is a resort built over that, and the older layer is still visible in foundations and retaining walls if you look for it. The replica European village at the top is not pretending to be the original; the original was a colonial suburb, and it is gone.
The Golden Bridge opened in 2018, carried on two vast stone-coloured hands that appear weathered and ancient.
They are neither. The hands are steel frame and mesh, coated and finished to look like eroded rock, and the ageing is applied rather than earned. That is not a criticism so much as the point: the structure was designed as an image before it was designed as a walkway, and it works precisely because the photograph is unmistakable.
What the photograph does not show is that the bridge is short, and that it is usually full of people getting the same picture. Early arrival is the only reliable answer to that.
The cable car climbs well over a kilometre in a single run, which is why the ride itself is one of the reasons to come.
It also means the weather at the top is a different weather from the one you left. Cloud sits on this ridge for large parts of the year, and a bright morning on the coast frequently ends in a white-out at the summit where the famous view is a wall of vapour twenty metres away.
Nobody can promise otherwise, and the visibility is not correlated with the forecast in Da Nang.
Take a layer. The ten-degree difference is real and the wind on the ridge adds to it.
The complex is large, laid out on several levels connected by steps and shorter cable cars, and the walking accumulates.
Weekends and Vietnamese holidays fill it, and the queues at the lower station on those days are long enough to shape the whole visit.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
As a hill station in 1919, purely because the air at altitude runs about ten degrees cooler than the coast, at a time when that was the only relief available.
Around two hundred villas were built and then abandoned after 1945. The site was ruins in the forest for roughly half a century.
No, and it does not claim to be. The original settlement was a colonial suburb and no longer exists; what stands now is a modern resort built over it.
They are from 2018. The structure is steel frame and mesh, finished to resemble eroded stone, with the weathering applied rather than acquired.
Not really. It was designed as an image first, and it succeeds on those terms. Just know the bridge itself is short and usually crowded.
It climbs well over a kilometre in one run, which makes the ride one of the reasons for the trip rather than just the access to it.
Often not. Cloud sits on the ridge for much of the year, and a clear morning at the coast regularly ends in a white-out at the top.
Not reliably. Conditions at the summit are not well predicted by the weather down in the city.