Pueblo Levee Mural

A mural stretching over three miles landed the Pueblo Levee Mural Project a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s farthest-stretching painted artwork.

The Pueblo Levee Mural Project began in the 1970s with a group of college students tagging the concrete levee that flanks the Arkansas River in Pueblo, Colorado.

According to Cynthia Ramu, a local artist who voluntarily served as the Project’s coordinator for over 20 years, the Levee Mural began with a sole depiction of a fish, which popped up overnight. The fish was soon inside a bathtub, and eventually joined by a team of rubber ducks.

What began as a youthful pastime became a renowned public art project famous for its size and ambition—as many as 1,000 artists may have contributed to the concrete canvas over the course of four decades.

But the levee itself, which was built following a flood that killed hundreds of people in Pueblo in the early 1920s, was showing signs of serious degradation when the decision was made to reinforce the concrete. In 2014, the Pueblo Conservancy District green-lit a multi-million-dollar series of restoration projects that would secure the levee for the public’s safety, but much to local dismay, at the cost of the Levee Mural.

Update as of June 2021: A large portion of the mural is no longer visible.