According to the article this bridge cost €2.3MM to build, which seems crazy cheap, even for Portugal. Does that sound low to anyone else?
By contrast, the minimum wage in Portugal is the lowest in Western Europe by far, at 665 euros (!!!) per month.
It's not like this bridge was built in particularly inhospitable terrain or something - it ends less than 300 meters from a paved road. The Swiss bridge appears to be 1750 meters from the closest road.
The bridges are very similar lengths - 494m vs 516m - and similar construction.
So why did the Portugese bridge cost 3.5x more?
In this case I think Switzerland is the outlier though. The country is extremely efficient with alpine infrastructure.
Since actual corruption is so hard to measure, we rank countries along a line of "corruption perception", i.e. how confident are people. Germany has an extremely good reputation. I believe you have to look at individual projects though and use a first principles approach: how much should it cost? What level of incompetence is believable vs plain corruption? Does the project make sense given larger government policy in the first place? Airport Berlin-Brandenburg, Wirecard, Nordstream are just the larger known cases, where corruption is the only possible explanation, there are tons of smaller projects as well, on which nobody bothers to put the spotlight.
Also, it's not like corruption doesn't happen everywhere. For instance, not so long ago the Estonian government (that would be Northern Europe, I think) resigned because a corruption scandal (1).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/13/estonian-gover...
Corruption is really not as common in southern Europe as the media would make it out to be. Incompetence is a far bigger problem and also far harder to persecute, sadly.
But the Portuguese bridge is over a river, this one is over a valley (though sure, the alps are a complication). They're also built slightly differently if you see the photos.
But yeah I think it's not only due to simple reasons.
https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2004/dec/09/cost-of-pedestria...
It was wider and stronger than this one to support the pipelines, and also required larger towers to support it on either end, which are surely a large part of the cost.
So it doesn't seem unreasonably cheap.
People have a design load in the 100psf range, cars are about half that.
(Source - I designed a pedestrian bridge in Seattle before leaving civil engineering)
Most road bridges just aren't that interesting. They're a concrete slab on a girder, either steel or precast, depending on your local construction environment.
(As my bridge wasn't structurally terribly interesting in the end, the biggest issues were clearance with the railroad below while fitting into the height profile we needed for the surface, given the 100yr old elevated structure we were connecting to. That and the extremely low quality soils at the site)
I guess there were some special construction challenges, but $415/sf is hardly a bargain for a bridge at first blush.
That may be low in some places where capital improvement costs are basically just graft.