The E-ELT here seen in a scale comparison with one of the VLT domes. ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is ranked as one of two top-priority large ground-based projects in the ASTRONET Roadmap for European astronomy, which is backed by the entire European scientific community and supported by the European Commission. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The VLT consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m across, which are generally used separately but can be used together to achieve very high angular resolution. Currently the VLT is the most productive ground-based facility for astronomy, with only the Hubble Space Telescope generating more scientific papers among facilities operating at visible wavelengths. The design for the E-ELT shown here was published in 2009 and is preliminary.