Things to do in Strasbourg: cathedral, Petite France and museums

Notre-Dame cathedral is the city’s landmark. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it was built between the 13th and 15th centuries. Inside, the astronomical clock and its procession of apostles draw a large audience every day. The platform, reached by a stairway, gives a view over the roofs of the Grande Île and across the plain. The building remains a place of worship, seat of the Archbishop of Strasbourg: services take place during public opening hours.

Place du Château, at the foot of the chevet, gathers two municipal museums. The Œuvre Notre-Dame museum occupies the house of the foundation that has run the cathedral works since the 13th century, with its courtyards and its Gothic garden. Right next door, the Rohan Palace houses the museum of decorative arts. In half a day you therefore cover the cathedral and two collections without ever taking the tram again.

The Grande Île is bounded by the Ill and the Faux-Rempart canal, and linked to the rest of the city by twenty-one bridges and footbridges. It has been on the World Heritage list since 1988. The listing covers not an isolated monument but an entire urban centre, organised around the cathedral. There you find the churches of Saint-Thomas, Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune and Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux, the Rohan Palace, the town hall, and to the west La Petite France with its Covered Bridges and its Vauban dam.

The Neustadt, added to the listing in 2017, corresponds to the extension begun in the 1880s, which tripled the area of the city. Its plan mixes a grid layout with a radial one. Place de la République, the former imperial square, is its pivot, with the Palais du Rhin. Avenue de la Liberté runs towards the church of Saint-Paul, on the Sainte-Hélène island, then to the university palace and the municipal baths. The route waymarked by the city from Place du Château runs about 2.4 kilometres.

La Petite France is the best preserved quarter of the historic centre. It was born in the early 12th century, when the city spread southwards along four parallel arms of the Ill. Unlike the bourgeois quarters around the cathedral, it is a district of trades: tanners set apart from the patrician houses because of the smells, grain mills and various workshops from the 15th century onwards. Hence these narrow, winding streets lined with half-timbered houses, around Place Benjamin Zix.

The same place also acted as a military lock. Four massive towers linked by bridges defended the way into the city, where the Ill divides. Their wooden roofs, which sheltered the soldiers, were removed in the 18th century, but the name Covered Bridges stuck. In 1686 Vauban completed the scheme with a dam capable of flooding the southern front. The structure has lost all military function: its terrace has become a panoramic walkway, from which you see the towers and roofs of La Petite France at a glance.

The city museums form a network of about a dozen establishments, to which are added the Aubette 1928 and the print and drawing cabinet. The list covers very different registers: archaeological museum, fine arts museum, museum of decorative arts, museum of modern and contemporary art, historical museum, Alsatian museum, Œuvre Notre-Dame museum, Tomi Ungerer museum and zoological museum. Several share the Rohan Palace, which lets you take in two or three without moving.

The museum of modern and contemporary art opened in 1998 in a light-filled building set on the bank of the Ill, near the station. Its collections run from 1870 to today, from Monet, Rodin, Picasso and Kandinsky to Niki de Saint Phalle and Nam June Paik. The Alsatian museum occupies 17th-century half-timbered houses on Quai Saint-Nicolas and tells of everyday life in Alsace from the 18th century to the present, with a reconstructed Stùb, kitchen and apothecary. It is closed for renovation: check its reopening before planning a visit.

The city has twenty-three market sites, spread across the days of the week except Sunday. A market site is an area of public space set aside for retail trade, food and non-food, for itinerant traders. The whole is governed by a municipal regulation of 2015 and overseen by the city’s public space service. In other words, there is almost always a market somewhere in Strasbourg, including outside the centre.

Two addresses serve as landmarks. The Broglie market is held on Place Broglie, in the heart of the Grande Île, at the tram stop of the same name on lines B, C and F; it runs on Wednesday and Friday. The Marne market sets up on Boulevard de la Marne, at the Observatoire stop on lines C, E and F, on Tuesday and Saturday. These days can shift around public holidays: a glance at the venue page on the city website saves a wasted journey.

The European quarter of Strasbourg received the European Heritage Label in December 2015. The city has waymarked a route of about 3.5 kilometres there, for an hour and a half of walking, starting from the Lieu d’Europe, 8 rue Boecklin. Eight stages make it up: the Lieu d’Europe, housed since 2014 in the former Villa Wach, the European Court of Human Rights, the European Parliament and its Louise Weiss building opened in 1999, the ARTE headquarters, the European Ombudsman in the Václav Havel building, the Council of Europe, the Agora and the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines.

The architecture there says something. The Human Rights Building, designed by Richard Rogers and inaugurated in 1995, follows the course of the Ill with its rounded lines: two cylindrical towers frame the entrance and a great glazed atrium marks the transparency of justice. The tower of the Louise Weiss building is deliberately left unfinished, to signify a European Union under construction. The Orangerie park, on Avenue de l’Europe, extends the walk: an English landscape garden, a lake, bridges and follies such as the Temple of Love or the half-timbered Buerehiesel house.