Ada Huja Bridge: Belgrade’s third Danube crossing

About Ada Huja Bridge: Belgrade’s third Danube crossing

By the ULTIMATE Belgrade Editorial Team

Downstream from the old town, Belgrade is preparing to build a new road bridge over the Danube, linking the city with the fast-growing suburbs on the left bank.

The back story

The Danube is Belgrade’s great river, about a kilometre wide as it sweeps past the old town, and for most of the city’s history it was crossed only by boat. The first road bridge, the Pančevo Bridge, opened in 1935 to link Belgrade with the Banat plain and the town of Pančevo. It was destroyed at the end of the Second World War and rebuilt in 1946, and for decades it was the only crossing in the city, carrying cars, trains and an ever-growing number of commuters from the new suburbs on the left bank at Krnjača and Borča.

Planners knew from the start that one bridge would not be enough. Since the 1950s every general plan for Belgrade has included a second crossing a few kilometres downstream, at Ada Huja, a former island in the Danube. Its name is often explained as the ‘rustling island’, and it was once covered in vineyards and known for its sulphur springs, until in 1960 it became the city’s rubbish dump. By 1977, when the landfill closed, the channel behind it had been filled and the island had become a peninsula.

Few projects in Belgrade have been promised more often: a Danube bridge at Ada Huja has been in every city plan since the 1950s.

Seventy years of waiting

The Pupin Bridge between Zemun and Borča finally opened a second Danube crossing upstream in 2014, but the bridge at Ada Huja remained a dream. It was announced in 2005, again in 2008, and again many times after 2016, each time with a new start date. In 2018 work began on the design and feasibility study, and by 2022 the design was complete, by the Belgrade engineers DB Inženjering with the Slovenian bridge specialists Ponting and Gradis BP. In 2023 the city submitted the environmental impact study, a key step towards a building permit.

The new bridge

The design is for a bridge of about 3.5 kilometres in all, including the long approaches across the floodplain, with the main crossing over the Danube itself about a kilometre long. It will be 32.5 metres wide, with three traffic lanes in each direction separated by a central reservation, and footpaths and cycle paths on both sides. It will cross the river about 2.6 kilometres downstream of the Pančevo Bridge, linking Višnjica and Karaburma on the right bank with Krnjača on the left.

What it will mean

The bridge is a key link in Belgrade’s planned inner ring road, joining the Pupin Bridge and the roads to Zrenjanin and Pančevo, and it will take heavy traffic off the old Pančevo Bridge, which can then be rebuilt. For the left-bank suburbs it will mean a second, faster way into the city. A construction start date has not yet been confirmed, so check back here for news.

Ada Huja today

Ada Huja itself is changing too. The city has decided that it will not be built over but turned into an urban park-forest along the Danube, and a skatepark opened there in 2022. With the riverside path, it is a quiet corner of the Danube to explore, a world away from the busy old town just upstream.

The bridge at a glance

From the City of Belgrade and the designers. Construction dates have not yet been confirmed.

Listings, fees and opening hours change, so please contact Ada Huja Bridge: Belgrade’s third Danube crossing directly before you visit.