Panus Bridge

1917 Dutch colonial bridge over the Ciliwung river in old Depok

The Panus Bridge (Jembatan Panus) is a concrete arch bridge over the Ciliwung river in the older part of Depok, just east of the Margonda corridor. It carries an ordinary two-lane road today but was a piece of colonial-era engineering in its time, replacing an earlier wooden crossing on the route between Batavia and Bogor.

Visit for the curiosity rather than the spectacle: there are heritage plaques at one end, the river still flows brown and fast beneath, and from the riverbank you get a sense of how dense the old town has become. The bridge is fifteen minutes' walk east of Depok railway station.

things to do sight bridge
A story
The bridge was built in 1917 by Andre Laurens, an ethnic-Belanda Depok engineer descended from the seventeenth-century freed-slave community that gave Depok its original character. For two centuries Depok had been a tiny Christian enclave inside Muslim West Java — the so-called Twelve Families — and the bridge was the village's main link to Batavia.