It crosses the Gulf of Corinth near Patras, linking the town of Rio on the Peloponnese peninsula to Antirrio on mainland Greece by road.

The 2,380-metre-long (7,810 ft; 1.48 mi) bridge dramatically improves access to and from the Peloponnese, which could previously be reached only by ferry or via the isthmus of Corinth in the east.

This bridge is widely considered[2] to be an engineering masterpiece, owing to several solutions applied to span the difficult site.

These difficulties include deep water, insecure materials for foundations, seismic activity, the probability of tsunamis, and the expansion of the Gulf of Corinth due to plate tectonics.

The bridge was planned in the mid-1990s and was built by a French-Greek consortium led by the French group Vinci SA which includes the Greek companies Hellenic Technodomiki-TEV, J&P-Avax, Athena, Proodeftiki and Pantechniki.

The water depth reaches 65 m, the seabed is mostly of loose sediment, the seismic activity and possibility of tectonic movement is significant, and the Gulf of Corinth is expanding at a rate of about 30 mm a year.

Beneath each pier the seabed was first reinforced and stabilized by driving 200 hollow steel pipes vertically into the ground.

The pier footings were not buried into the seabed, but rather rest on a bed of gravel meticulously leveled to an even surface (a difficult endeavor at this depth).

During an earthquake, the piers can move laterally on the sea floor with the gravel bed absorbing the energy.

Protection from the effect of high winds on the decking is provided by the use of aerodynamic spoiler-like fairing and on the cables by the use of spiral Scruton strakes.