The 2,000 year-old Pont du Gard is the highest bridge the Romans ever built. At 48 metres, they felt is was the greatest testimony to their empire, which by the 1^st century AD included a Gaul province of all of France and Belgium. The province prospered with communications and a network of cities packed with public buildings and leisure facilities like elaborate public baths and amphitheatres. In the countryside large villas and trade routes were established. The first Roman Emperor Augustus upheld the Pax Romana – an enforced peace which allowed the Gauls to concentrate on the development of art and culture rather than war. The towering Pont du Gard is a feat of engineering, sprawling over the babbling Riviere Gardon and carrying water along its third storey aqueduct for 50 kilometres from the town of Uzes to the city of Nimes, just south of here. The bridge is made from blocks of stone, some weighing up to 6 tonnes and hauled into place with a system of pulleys and slave labour. A huge build-up of calcium in the water channels suggests that the aqueduct was in continuous use for 500 years. Today it’s 34 degrees, the bridge is pale and harmonious in three tiers of continuous arches, disappearing into the region’s deciduous forests on both banks. It’s looks as though it could have been built yesterday. The 1^st century designers included Roman inscriptions like a damaged phallus carving for good luck, and even slightly curved the overall design of the bridge to make up for the Gardon’s currents. On one side the river is shallow and calm, on the other it’s a jade gorge deep enough for swan divers off the adjoining limestone cliffs. From the bridge I’m watching a young woman sculling in the clear green water, her hair swaying around her head in slow motion. She’s tiny down there, and white, a dizzying and informative view from so many metres up – and yet her view of me, and the arches all around, is even better.

Seville