Strasbourg, France
Strasbourg's historic center occupies an island ringed by the River Ill, the whole of it a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and most of that island is closed to cars. The buildings date largely from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with some going back to the medieval period, and the pedestrian zone that links them is among the largest anywhere in Europe. At its heart stands a cathedral that was the tallest building in the world for more than two hundred years.
It is a city that rewards walking more than spending too much time planning -- just go for it. The distances are short, the cathedral spire is visible from most of the old town and works as a compass, and the pleasure of the place is mostly in turning down a lane because it looks good rather than because it is on a list.
Petite France
Petite France is the most photographed quarter of the city, a knot of canals and half-timbered houses at the western end of the island where the Ill splits into several channels. It was the working district of the tanners, millers and fishmongers, who needed the water for their trades, and the buildings are shaped by that history.
The tanners' houses are the distinctive ones, with open galleries under wide roofs where hides were hung to dry in the moving air. Several still stand directly on the canal edge with their timbers going down to the waterline.
The reflections are the reason people come. On a still morning the pastel facades double in the water almost perfectly, and the effect holds along several hundred meters of canal.
The channels were dug and managed for power. A series of water mills stood here grinding grain and driving mechanical work of other kinds, and the weirs and sluices that controlled the flow are still in place and still operating.
The locks are worth a few minutes on their own. Boats step up and down through them all day and the gates and walkways are open to walk across, which puts you level with the water in the middle of the channel.
After dark the quarter changes completely. The buildings are lit from below, the water goes black and the reflections sharpen, and the lanes empty out enough to hear the weir. It is the best hour of the day here in any season.
In December the lighting is layered over the Christmas decoration, so the canal fronts carry both. The combination is heavy-handed nowhere else in Alsace and somehow works here.
The Cathedral
Strasbourg Cathedral is built of the pink Vosges sandstone that gives it its color, and the west front is one of the most heavily worked facades in Gothic architecture. Statues, canopies, colonnettes and tracery cover almost every available surface, and the stone changes from rose to deep red depending on the hour and the weather.
The detail rewards standing still. The facade carries hundreds of carved figures arranged in tiers, and the vertical shafts in front of the stonework produce a screen effect that makes the whole front look lighter than the mass behind it.
The portals are carved with narrative scenes, the tympanum above each door filled with figures worked in bands. Most of the sculpture was made for an audience that could not read, and it was meant to be studied slowly at the door before going in.
Only one tower was ever finished. The plan called for two, but the north tower and its spire went up alone in the fifteenth century to a height of 142 meters, making the cathedral the tallest building in the world from 1647 until 1874. The asymmetry is now the thing everyone recognizes it by.
Inside, the nave is high and narrow in the French Gothic manner, with tall clustered piers running up into the vault. The stained glass is largely original, much of it from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the light it throws is deep rather than bright.
The organ hangs off the north wall of the nave in a gilded and painted swallow's-nest case, high above the floor and set well forward of the wall behind it. It is one of the most photographed interiors in the building and unusual in being placed to the side rather than at the west end.
The tower can be climbed. Around 330 steps in a stone spiral take you up to the viewing platform at the base of the spire, and the stair is narrow enough that traffic runs one way at busy times.
The reward is the best view in Alsace. The old town lies directly below, a mass of steep tiled roofs and dormers packed onto the island, with the river and its bridges showing at the edges.
From up there the density of the medieval town is obvious in a way it is not at street level. The roofs are enormous relative to the buildings under them, three and four stories of attic space stacked above the living floors, which is how Alsatian houses stored grain.
The Ponts Couverts and the River
At the western tip of the island stand the Ponts Couverts, four square stone towers left from the fourteenth-century defenses, spanning the channels where the river divides. The covered roofs that gave the bridges their name are long gone, but the name stuck and the towers did not.
Seen from the water they line up in a row across the channels, and on a calm day they double in the reflection. This is the standard postcard view of the city after the cathedral and Petite France.
Close up the towers are plain military work, unornamented blocks of sandstone with small openings, in complete contrast to the decorated houses a few hundred meters upstream.
The riverbanks around them are open and green, with the water dropping over weirs and the bare winter trees leaving the views clear. It is the one part of the center that feels spacious.
Swans and waterfowl work the channels year-round and people stop on the bridges to watch them, which is as good a way as any to spend twenty minutes between sights.
Boat tours run the full circuit of the island from a landing near the Palais Rohan. The glass-roofed boats go year-round, take about seventy minutes, and cover the old town, the locks and the modern European quarter downstream, which is otherwise a long walk from the center.
It is the easiest way to see the waterfront facades, most of which face the water rather than the street and cannot be seen properly from land at all.
The riverside paths make a good circuit on foot as well, running most of the way around the island under the trees, past the quays and back to the bridges.
Palaces and Museums
The Palais Rohan sits on the river just south of the cathedral, an eighteenth-century episcopal palace built for the prince-bishops in a style that belongs to Paris rather than Alsace. It now holds three museums under one roof, covering fine arts, decorative arts and archaeology.
The city's museum holdings are substantial for its size, and the galleries are rarely oppressive. School groups work through them constantly, which is a good sign about how the collections are run.
Away from the old town the architecture shifts. The nineteenth-century quarter laid out during the German period is built on a monumental scale, with wide avenues, classical facades and public buildings much larger than anything on the island.
That district is built from the same pink sandstone as the cathedral, which ties it visually to the medieval center despite being six hundred years younger. It was granted UNESCO listing in its own right in 2017.
Streets, Shops and Winstubs
The retail center sits in the old town five or ten minutes' walk from the cathedral, so the shopping and the sightseeing are not separate errands. Strasbourg is a prosperous and rather dignified city and the stores reflect it, with prices in line with any other European city of its size.
One of the pleasures of the center is a long arcaded street running out of the main square into the heart of town, which gives the covered, cloistered feeling of a medieval loggia and shelters you when the weather turns.
Off the main routes the half-timbering takes over again. The framing here is heavier and darker than in the wine villages, with the infill painted in strong colors and the upper floors overhanging the lane.
Whole runs of facade are painted in ochre, blue, green and rose, with green shutters and window boxes, and the effect at street level is closer to Colmar than to anywhere in France proper.
The window detailing is worth a look on the older houses, with leaded panes, painted frames and carved sills, much of it original rather than restored.
For eating, the local institution is the winstub, a wood-panelled wine tavern serving Alsatian food — choucroute, tarte flambée, baeckeoffe and the like — with the region's white wines by the glass. They are small, warm and busy, and in December they are the obvious place to end an afternoon outdoors.
Hotels are spread across the same small area. There are small properties in the historic center and larger modern ones near the station, and everything in both categories is within walking distance of everything else.
The Christmas Market
The square in front of the cathedral is the center of the city in every practical sense. It is lively from early morning, and in December it is where the Christmas market sets up first, the stallholders unloading while the square is still half empty. The tourist information office is here as well, with maps, brochures and a booklet devoted to Strasbourg as the capital of Christmas.
Strasbourg claims the oldest Christmas market in Europe. The first was held in 1570, and the tradition has continued nearly every year since, spreading from here across the continent and eventually around the world. Recent years have made it very large indeed.
The market runs from late November through Christmas, open every day from about ten in the morning until eight at night, spread across eleven separate locations in the city with more than three hundred booths between them. A great deal of what is sold is handmade — toys, textiles, clothing, ornaments and one-of-a-kind pieces you will not find elsewhere — alongside food stalls and the hot wine that makes standing outside bearable.
Two million people come during that one month, many of them arriving from Paris on the high-speed train, so timing matters more here than in the smaller Alsatian towns. Weekend evenings are shoulder to shoulder, which is wonderful if crowds are what you came for. A weekday morning around ten or eleven, with everything open and the streets still moving freely, is a completely different city.
December temperatures sit in the thirties and forties, cold but not punishing, and layers plus a cup of mulled wine handle it. The lights come on around five in the afternoon and the whole center takes on a party atmosphere that runs until the stalls close.
Pick up the tourist office map if you want to see all eleven markets, but the better approach is to wander. Spend a few days rather than a few hours and you start running into things that were not on any schedule — a procession, a brass band, Santa Claus going past on a bicycle. There are always quiet corners a few streets back from the market squares where you can have the town more or less to yourself.
Arriving
The Gare de Strasbourg is a nineteenth-century station wrapped in a curved glass shell added in 2007, so the original sandstone facade now stands inside a glazed hall. It is a genuinely good piece of work and worth a look even if you arrive by car.
The TGV puts Paris under two hours away, which is why the Christmas market fills so heavily at weekends, and the station is a short walk or one tram stop from the old town. Trains also run east across the Rhine into Germany and south down the wine road toward Colmar.
How Long to Stay
Plan on at least a day and a half to two full days in Strasbourg itself, which covers the cathedral, Petite France, the museums, the shopping streets and enough unstructured walking to make the place stick. A third day is well spent going out to the wine villages in the foothills of the Vosges, an easy trip and an entirely different landscape.
Those villages are covered on their own pages here: Colmar as the base, with Kaysersberg, Ribeauvillé and Riquewihr along the Route des Vins and the hilltop fortress of Haut-Koenigsbourg above them.
History and Setting
Strasbourg sits on the Rhine plain in Alsace, a few kilometers west of the river and the German border, roughly 400 kilometers east of Paris and 70 kilometers north of Colmar. The historic center, known as the Grande Île, is an island formed where the River Ill splits and rejoins, and that ring of water is what defined the medieval city and still bounds the old town today.
The Romans founded a camp here called Argentoratum in 12 BC, on the road network they were building along the Rhine. The later name comes from the Germanic Strateburgum, the town of roads, which describes exactly why the site mattered: it sat where the routes along the Rhine met the routes running west into Gaul.
It became a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire in 1262 and stayed one for over four centuries, governed by its own guilds and merchants rather than by a bishop or a duke. That independence paid for the cathedral and for most of the merchant houses still standing. Johannes Gutenberg spent about a decade here in the 1430s and 1440s working out the technology that became movable-type printing, and the city was an early and enthusiastic center of the Reformation.
Louis XIV annexed Strasbourg for France in 1681. Germany took it back after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and made it the capital of the imperial province of Alsace-Lorraine, which is when the monumental German quarter east of the island was built. It returned to France in 1918, was annexed again by Germany in 1940, and was liberated in November 1944.
That history is why the city reads as it does. The architecture, the food, the dialect still spoken by some older residents and the presence of both beer and white wine on every table all come from being fought over for three hundred years. It is also why Strasbourg was chosen after the Second World War as a seat of European institutions: the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament all sit here, in the modern quarter downstream from the old town, deliberately placed on the fault line the wars were fought along.