Cầu Ông Cọp - also known as Cầu Miếu Ông Cọp or Cầu Bình Thạnh - is a roughly 700-800 meter wooden bridge crossing the Bình Bá river (also called the Phú Ngân river) in Tuy An district, connecting villages in An Ninh Tây commune with Xuân Đài ward in neighbouring Sông Cầu town. It's built almost entirely from phi lao and eucalyptus timber planks, with bamboo railings, no concrete, no steel, and no engineering firm involved.
Who Built the Bridge
Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn't a grassroots community project: it was privately funded and built in 1998 for over 1 billion VND by Nguyễn Phước Thọ, an individual from Nha Trang, and opened for use in 1999. Local families later took over its ongoing management, toll collection, and reconstruction, with some now also contributing capital themselves.
Floods and Rebuilding
Every flood season, parts of the bridge get swept away or damaged, and in 2025 it was reportedly washed away entirely by flooding before being rebuilt - a dramatic but telling example of the bridge's whole design philosophy: wood and bamboo are relatively quick and cheap to rebuild compared to a concrete structure, which is precisely why this cycle of damage-and-reconstruction has continued for decades rather than pushing the community toward a permanent replacement.
A concrete replacement was in fact proposed by Phú Yên's transport department around 2016, targeted for completion by 2018-2020, but as of the last confirmed update the project remained unbuilt due to funding shortfalls - so the wooden bridge experience may not be permanent, but it has also proven more durable in practice than its fragile appearance suggests.
Film Location: Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass
The bridge became known beyond Phú Yên after appearing as a filming location in the 2015 film 'Tôi Thấy Hoa Vàng Trên Cỏ Xanh' (Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass) - a critically acclaimed Vietnamese coming-of-age film that put Phú Yên on the domestic tourism map.
The Legend Behind the Name
The bridge's name comes from a nearby shrine, tied to a fuller local legend: a renowned local midwife was once visited late one night by a tiger, terrifying the household - but the tiger's actual purpose was to lead her up the mountain to help deliver its own cub. After a successful delivery, the tiger carried her home and later repaid her kindness with a wild boar.
When the midwife eventually died, the tiger is said to have continued visiting her grave out of remembrance; when the tiger itself later died, villagers built a small shrine - Miếu Ông Cọp - in tribute to its loyalty and good character. The bridge, built near this shrine, inherited its name.