A navigable canal or navigable canal is a waterway, often of artificial origin, usually connecting lakes, rivers or oceans. They are used for transportation, often plied by barges in river channels and by ships in canals that connect oceans.

The inland canals preceded the development of the railway during the Industrial Revolution and some of them were later dried and used as clear passages to build railways.

The study of the use of canals has been developed over the centuries by Leonardo da Vinci and other geniuses who dedicated a lot of energy to their improvement. Among other things, he has contributed several ideas for the development of the completely artificial canals that surround Milan (the so-called “Navigli”), which connect the city with the Ticino and Adda rivers. Through the latter, one could indirectly reach Lake Maggiore to the north by waterways, using the Po River, to the Adriatic Sea to the east. Using these relatively small and shallow waterways, the transport of goods was done by means of almost flat-bottomed barges: by this means the construction materials used for the construction of the city were largely transported.[1]​.

Among the examples of large canals that have greatly changed the economy of entire continents are certainly the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. With the opening of these great engineering works, intercontinental transportation times were drastically reduced and marked an exponential growth in Western trade with the Far East.

Another very characteristic type of canal is the one that allows navigation inside cities. An example of navigable canals internal to the city could be the canals of Taranto, where the canals allow access for warships to the Maritime Military Arsenal, in the city. But the best example is naturally that of Venice: although other cities (for example Amsterdam) have several kilometers of navigable waterways within them, Venice is the only example in the world of a city in which the only way to move, apart from pedestrians, is through its intricate network of canals.

Africa.

America.

Although they are not built and there are no start dates for construction and commissioning, there have long been two large interoceanic canal projects in Nicaragua (Canal de Nicaragua) and Colombia (Canal del Río Atrato), which seek to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as alternatives to the Panama Canal, which presents difficulties in times of drought due to the low volume of water that makes it difficult for large ships and container ships to pass through the locks, waiting even days in the open sea while their turn comes to cross it.