Strasbourg

Top things to do in Strasbourg

1. 01

   Cathedrale Notre-Dame - the pink sandstone giant and its astronomical clock

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   Begun in 1176 and finished, as far as it ever was, when the north spire went up in 1439, it stayed the tallest building in the world for more than two centuries, until a German cathedral finally overtook it in the 1870s. The stone is Vosges sandstone, which turns rose and then almost red as the light moves across the west front, and the front itself is a thicket of statuary and stone tracery so fine it looks knitted. Inside, look for the thirteenth-century Angel Pillar, the medieval glass in the nave and the great rose window; the nineteenth-century astronomical clock runs its parade of apostles once a day around the middle of the day, and the queue for it forms well before that. The climb is over three hundred steps to a platform on the tower, with the Black Forest on one horizon and the Vosges on the other - Goethe, a law student here, used the same climb to cure his fear of heights.

2. 02

   Petite France - the tanners' quarter, the locks and the covered bridges

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   The western tip of the island, where the river splits into channels that once drove mills and washed hides: tall timber houses with slatted drying lofts, flower boxes, a swing bridge that opens for boats and a stepped lock you can watch work. The pretty name has an ugly origin - a sixteenth-century hospice here treated syphilis, which each country politely named after its neighbour. At the far end stand the three surviving towers of the medieval Covered Bridges, uncovered since the eighteenth century, and behind them the low dam Vauban threw across the river in the 1690s, whose roof terrace gives the single best view back over the towers to the cathedral. Come early or late: the middle of the day here is the most photographed and most congested corner in Alsace.

3. 03

   Palais Rohan - three museums in the prince-bishops' palace

   culture arts history

   A great slab of Parisian classicism dropped on the river bank behind the cathedral in the 1730s for the Rohan cardinal-bishops, who ran Alsace as princes of the church and lived accordingly. It now holds three collections in one building: the archaeological museum in the cellars, taking Alsace from prehistory through the Roman garrison; the decorative arts on the ground floor, where the state apartments survive intact alongside one of the largest collections of French ceramics anywhere; and the fine arts upstairs, strong in Italian and Flemish primitives with El Greco, Rubens, Goya and Canaletto among the names. The palace also gave its name to the diamond necklace affair that helped destroy Marie-Antoinette's reputation.

4. 04

   The Neustadt - the imperial city the Germans built after 1871

   history culture arts off beaten path ⭐ Highly recommended

   When the new German Empire annexed Alsace it made Strasbourg the capital of its border province and tripled the size of the city on the north bank, in one planned sweep of axial avenues, monumental public buildings and vast apartment blocks. Place de la Republique is the hinge of it, a circular park ringed by the Kaiser's palace, the national and university library and the theatre; the axis runs on across the water to the university's own palace, and the streets between are a catalogue of Rhenish neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic and Jugendstil, with the twin spires of the old garrison church rising straight out of the river. It was listed alongside the medieval island in 2017 - the two halves are one story - and almost nobody walks it, which makes it the best hour in the city for anyone tired of timber frames.

5. 05

   Winstubs and the Alsatian table - tarte flambee, choucroute and baeckeoffe

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   A winstub is literally a wine room: panelled, cramped, warm, with checked cloths and shared tables, and it is where the region's cooking is best met. Tarte flambee is the entry point - dough rolled paper-thin, spread with fromage blanc, cream, onion and bacon, blasted in a hot oven and brought out in rounds to be torn up by hand. Then choucroute garnie, sauerkraut slowly cooked in Riesling under smoked pork and sausage; baeckeoffe, three meats marinated in white wine and sealed under a dough lid, once left at the baker's oven on laundry day; onion tart, potted head cheese, Munster from the Vosges valleys with a dish of cumin, and fluted kougelhopf for breakfast. Drink the local whites - Riesling, Sylvaner, Pinot Gris, the perfumed Gewurztraminer, sparkling Cremant - and note that the cellar beneath the old civil hospital still keeps a cask filled in 1472, reckoned the oldest wine in the world still in its barrel.

6. 06

   Christkindelsmarik - the Christmas market, running since 1570

   culture arts food shopping 👍 Popular

   Among the oldest in Europe, and the reason the city calls itself the capital of Christmas: the Lutheran reformers of 1570 swept away the old Saint Nicholas fair and put a Christ Child market in its place, and it has run ever since. In its season the market is not one square but a dozen, threaded through the whole centre - chalets under the cathedral, the long-established rows on Place Broglie, the giant tree on Place Kleber, one square handed over to a guest region or country each year. What you actually eat and drink is the point: mulled wine, spiced bredele biscuits by the bagful, little brioche men, hot sausage, gingerbread. Go in with clear eyes - it is cold and often wet, the crowds are dense enough that the centre is filtered through checkpoints, and every room in the city is spoken for long in advance.

7. 07

   European Parliament and the Council of Europe - the institutions in the Wacken

   history culture arts

   A twenty-minute tram ride north of the old town sits the other reason Strasbourg is on the map. The Council of Europe, the continent's first postwar institution, has been here since 1949; the European Court of Human Rights occupies Richard Rogers' pair of steel drums on the water beside it; and the European Parliament's Louise Weiss building, opened in 1999, holds a hemicycle under an elliptical tower deliberately left looking unfinished, in a nod to Bruegel's Tower of Babel. The Parliament runs a visitor centre and lets the public into the gallery during plenary sittings, which fill the quarter with interpreters, journalists and lobbyists for a few days at a time; the rest of the month it is oddly quiet. The cheap way to see all three is from the water, or on foot round the boating lake next door.

8. 08

   Boat trip on the Ill - the loop around the island and out to Europe

   scenic

   Glass-topped boats leave from the landing below the Palais Rohan and take a bit over an hour to run the full circuit: down past the quays and the old customs house, through the lock at Petite France with the water dropping under you, out beneath the Covered Bridges and the dam, then back up the northern channel and north again to the European quarter. It is the standard tourist thing and it is genuinely the best orientation in Strasbourg, because the city was built facing its water and half the good facades can only be read from a boat. Sailings run into the evening in the warmer months.

9. 09

   Musee Alsacien - how Alsace actually lived

   culture arts history

   Three old burgher houses on the south quay, knocked together into a warren of wooden galleries, staircases and low rooms furnished as they would have been in the villages: painted marriage furniture, box beds, wine-growers' tools, moulds for kougelhopf and springerle, printed charms against witchcraft, and a serious section on the rural Jewish communities of Alsace, which were among the oldest in France. It is a small museum with a strong argument - that the region's identity is neither French nor German but its own thing - and it explains more of what you see outside than any other collection in the city.

10. 10

    Eglise Saint-Thomas - the Protestant cathedral and its Silbermann organ

    history culture arts

    The city went over to the Reformation in the 1520s and stayed largely Protestant even after Louis XIV took it back for France, and this five-naved hall church is the result: whitewashed, austere, wide rather than tall, and still the mother church of Alsace's Lutherans. The Silbermann organ was played by the young Mozart on his way through and, much later, by Albert Schweitzer, who was an organ scholar here before he was a doctor in Africa. Improbably, the other thing inside is one of the great pieces of French baroque sculpture: Pigalle's theatrical mausoleum for the Marshal de Saxe, who is shown striding into his own tomb while France pleads with Death to wait.

11. 11

    Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain - Arp, Dore and the Aubette

    culture arts

    A long glass hall on the far side of the water from Petite France, best known for two local sons pulling in opposite directions: Jean Arp, born here, whose biomorphic sculptures and reliefs have a room of their own, and Gustave Dore, also born here, whose enormous Christ Leaving the Praetorium takes up most of a wall. Around them sit Impressionists, Symbolists, a good photography collection and rotating contemporary shows. Complete it in the centre with the Aubette on the main square, where Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Theo van Doesburg built a set of hard-edged abstract interiors in the late 1920s that were painted over within a decade and have since been partly restored.

12. 12

    Parc de l'Orangerie - the storks and the city's oldest park

    nature wildlife scenic

    The green lung on the European-quarter side, laid out in the 1690s and remodelled around a pavilion built for the Empress Josephine, with a boating lake, a bowling green and long avenues of old trees. The reason to come is the storks: the white stork is the emblem of Alsace and had almost vanished from the region by the 1970s, and the breeding enclosure here was part of bringing it back. There are now nests on chimneys, church towers and platforms all over the plain, and a resident colony clattering their bills above the park - the most reliable place in the city to see them close up, and a free hour that children like more than any museum.

13. 13

    Kehl and the Jardin des Deux Rives - walk or ride into Germany

    off beaten path scenic

    The Rhine is only a few kilometres east, and crossing it is one of the odder pleasures here. A garden was laid out on both banks and stitched together by a slender pedestrian bridge, so you can walk out of France and into Germany over the water in a few minutes, with barges below and no formality at all. A tram line now does the same thing on its own bridge, running from the middle of the old town to the centre of Kehl, where the shops, the cheap tobacco and the German bakeries make it a standing local errand as much as a sightseeing trip.

Getting to & around Strasbourg

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