Things to do
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Dragon Bridge
A steel dragon runs the length of this crossing over the Hàn river, six lanes wide and opened in 2013. At nine on Saturday and Sunday nights the head breathes fire, then sprays water over the road. Traffic is stopped for it and the pavements fill an hour beforehand, so the riverside cafés on the east bank are the calmer vantage point.
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Golden Bridge
Two enormous hands, moulded from fibreglass and wire mesh to look like weathered stone, hold up a walkway in the hills west of the city. It opened in 2018 to link a cable car station with the gardens of the Bà Nà Hills resort. Cloud sits on the ridge much of the year, and the ride up plus the resort around it takes a full day.
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Linh Ung Pagoda
Quan Âm stands sixty-seven metres tall on the Sơn Trà slope, back to the hill and face out to sea, where the fishing fleet works. The temple below was finished in 2010 and entry is free. Covered shoulders and knees are expected at the halls. The road up carries on into the peninsula's forest, where red-shanked douc langurs live.
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Marble Mountains
Five limestone outcrops named for the classical elements stand between the city and Hội An, and stairs or a lift climb the one called Thủy Sơn. Its caves hold shrines: in Huyền Không a hole in the roof drops a shaft of light onto a seated Buddha, and Âm Phủ is staged as a Buddhist hell. Carvers still work stone at the foot of the hills, though quarrying the mountains is now banned.
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Museum of Cham Sculpture
French archaeologists gathered Cham sandstone here from 1915, and the building that holds it borrows its own roof lines from the towers the carvings came out of. Altars and pedestals lifted from Trà Kiệu and Mỹ Sơn fill the halls, with dancing apsaras, Garuda and lingams. An hour covers it, and it makes far more sense of Mỹ Sơn when visited beforehand.
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My Khe Beach
Da Nang's long east-facing strand runs for several kilometres below a wall of hotels, and American servicemen on leave here in the war knew it as China Beach. Residents swim in numbers at first light and again after work, avoiding the middle of the day. Calm water lasts from around April to August; the northeast monsoon that follows brings rough water and red flags.