🇫🇷 France · East and Central
Strasbourg is one of those cities that look like something out of a storybook: half-timbered houses with steep roofs leaning over the canals, geraniums in the windows, covered bridges and a pink stone cathedral that has dominated the sky for more than six centuries. Capital of Alsace and at the same time a capital of Europe, it is a crossroads of worlds: here they speak French but eat choucroute and pretzels, toast with Alsatian white wine and celebrate Christmas like nowhere else in France.
Its heart, the Grande Île, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and you only need to get lost in its streets to understand why. Notre-Dame cathedral, with its single 142-metre spire and its astonishing astronomical clock, was for centuries the tallest building in Christendom. A few steps away, the La Petite France quarter lays out its most famous postcard: mills, locks and tanners' houses reflected in the water. And around them, the German Neustadt, the Palais Rohan and the modern European quarter tell the story of a city that changed flag again and again.
This guide covers the essentials of Strasbourg with a practical, warm eye: what to see in the historic centre, how to climb to the cathedral platform, when the Christmas markets arrive, how to slip away to the villages and vineyards of the wine route, and how to get around by tram and on foot. Whether in spring with the canals in bloom or in December among the lights and the smell of vin chaud, Strasbourg offers one of the most charming corners in Europe.
Strasbourg began as a Roman camp called Argentoratum, founded around 12 BC beside the Rhine. After the fall of Rome, the Franks rebuilt it and gave it its Germanic name, Strateburgum, 'the city of the roads'. In the Middle Ages it became a prosperous free city of the Holy Roman Empire, and it was there that Johannes Gutenberg lived and perfected printing before moving to Mainz. In 1681 King Louis XIV annexed it to France. In 1792, during the Revolution, the officer Rouget de Lisle composed in Strasbourg the 'War Song for the Army of the Rhine', which would go down in history as La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. Between 1871 and 1945 the city changed hands four times between France and Germany, according to the wars. After the Second World War, and as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation, Strasbourg was chosen as the seat of the European institutions. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The France of the Rhine and the Rhône: Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, fought over by France and Germany across three wars and today a capital of Europe; and Lyon, ancient Roman Lugdunum, city of silk, of the Resistance and of food.
Read the history of East and Central →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On a fertile plain beside the Rhine, where the river Ill splits into several arms, the Romans very quickly grasped the strategic value of the place. Around 12 BC, under the emperor Augustus, they founded a military camp there called Argentoratum, meant to watch the Empire's frontier against the Germanic tribes on the far side of the Rhine. The name, of Celtic root, probably referred to the watercourses or to silver (argentum). For almost four centuries the Legio VIII Augusta was stationed there, and around the fort a town grew with baths, a river port and active trade.
Argentoratum was the scene of a famous episode of late antiquity: in the year 357 AD, at the battle of Strasbourg (or battle of Argentoratum), the future emperor Julian, then caesar of the Gauls, defeated a far larger coalition of Alemanni, securing the Rhine frontier for a time. But Germanic pressure did not let up. As the Empire weakened, the town was razed and rebuilt several times, until the great invasions of the 5th century left it in ruins.
Of that Roman past there are archaeological remains preserved today above all in the Archaeological Museum of the Palais Rohan. Over the ruins of Argentoratum, after the victory of Clovis and the Franks around the year 500, a new town was raised and given a Germanic name: Strateburgum, 'the city of the roads' or 'of the routes', referring to its position at a crossroads of trade. From that name comes today's Strasbourg, and its destiny was already written into it: always to be a place of passage and of meeting between worlds.
The Middle Ages made Strasbourg one of the richest and freest cities of the Holy Roman Empire. As early as the year 842 the city had entered European history: it was there that the Oaths of Strasbourg (Serments de Strasbourg) were sworn, a pact of alliance between Charlemagne's grandsons, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, against their brother Lothair. Their importance goes beyond politics: the oaths were drawn up in two vernacular languages —an early form of Romance (a forerunner of French) and of Germanic (a forerunner of German)— and they are considered the first surviving document written in something close to French. In Strasbourg, once again, the two worlds crossed.
For centuries the city was governed by its prince-bishops, but in 1262, after the battle of Hausbergen, the burghers rebelled and won their autonomy. In 1334 Strasbourg officially became a Free Imperial City (Freie Reichsstadt), answerable only to the emperor and governed by its own guilds and magistrates. It was a time of great prosperity: the cathedral was raised, its spire completed in 1439, making it the tallest building in Christendom, and trade, banking and the crafts flourished.
In that atmosphere of freedom and learning a decisive figure appeared. Between roughly 1434 and 1444, a goldsmith from Mainz named Johannes Gutenberg lived in Strasbourg, where he experimented with the technique that would change the world: movable-type printing. Although he would perfect it and publish his famous Bible in Mainz, it was in Strasbourg that he took his first steps, and the city claims him proudly: a large statue of him, the work of David d'Angers, has presided since 1840 over the square that bears his name. Strasbourg soon became an important centre of printing and humanism, and in the 16th century it embraced the Protestant Reformation, with a university founded in 1538 (recognised as such in 1621) that drew intellectuals from all over Europe.
The 17th century changed the course of Strasbourg. France, under Louis XIV, was extending its borders eastwards, and the rich free city on the Rhine was a coveted prize. In September 1681, in full peacetime and with barely any resistance, French troops surrounded the city and the burghers capitulated: Strasbourg became part of the kingdom of France. The Sun King did, however, respect many of its particularities —freedom of Protestant worship, its institutions, the use of German— and commissioned the military engineer Vauban to fortify the place, work of which the Barrage Vauban of 1690 still survives. The cathedral, which had been a Protestant church during the Reformation, returned to Catholic worship.
A century later, Strasbourg was the setting for one of the founding moments of modern France. In April 1792, with war on Austria just declared, an officer and engineer named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, posted to the city's garrison, composed in a single night —according to tradition, at the house of the mayor, Baron Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich— a song to lift the troops' spirits. He titled it 'Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin' (War Song for the Army of the Rhine). The melody spread quickly and a few months later it was sung by the volunteers from Marseille as they entered Paris: hence it stayed forever as 'La Marseillaise'. In 1795 it was proclaimed the national anthem of France. That the most famous anthem of French patriotism was born in Strasbourg, a border city largely German-speaking, is one of the great paradoxes and symbols of its history.
The Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire fully integrated Alsace into France, and through the 19th century the region felt increasingly French, although it kept its language, its cooking and its Germanic customs. That double identity, far from being resolved, was about to turn Strasbourg into a bargaining chip in Europe's great wars.
No French city changed nationality as many times in so short a period as Strasbourg. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Strasbourg was subjected to a brutal siege and bombardment by German troops, which destroyed much of the city and its library. With the French defeat and the Treaty of Frankfurt of 1871, Alsace and part of Lorraine were annexed to the new German Empire. Strasbourg became the capital of the 'Reichsland' of Alsace-Lorraine and Berlin invested enormously in it: the Neustadt was built, the broad imperial quarter of monumental avenues, and the administration and education were Germanised. For almost half a century, the city was German.
The end of the First World War, in 1918, returned Alsace to France amid celebrations. But the calm did not last. In 1940, with the Nazi invasion at the start of the Second World War, Hitler's Germany annexed Alsace again —this time without even a treaty— and imposed a brutal policy of forced Germanisation: French was banned, names were changed, Jews and opponents were persecuted, and tens of thousands of young Alsatians were forcibly conscripted into the German army, the so-called 'malgré-nous' ('against our will'), many of whom died on the eastern front. Strasbourg lived through years of fear and exile; much of its population had been evacuated at the beginning of the war.
On 23 November 1944, General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division liberated Strasbourg, fulfilling the so-called 'Oath of Kufra' that Leclerc had sworn in 1941 not to stop until he saw the French flag flying again over the cathedral. The city returned definitively to France in 1945. Four changes of flag in less than eighty years left a deep mark on Alsatian identity: a border culture, bilingual, marked by the wounds of the wars and, at the same time, by a vocation for reconciliation that would soon find a European destiny.
Out of all the wounds of its history, Strasbourg made a symbol. Precisely because it had so often been land disputed between France and Germany, the city was chosen after the Second World War as the seat of the institutions seeking to leave centuries of European conflict behind. In 1949 the Council of Europe, the organisation promoting human rights and democracy on the continent, settled there. Shortly afterwards came the European Court of Human Rights and, above all, the European Parliament, which holds its monthly plenary sessions in Strasbourg, sharing functions with Brussels.
Strasbourg thus became one of the official capitals of the European Union, alongside Brussels and Luxembourg, and a powerful emblem of Franco-German reconciliation and of European construction. The modern European quarter, with the glazed tower of the Parliament (the Louise Weiss building, opened in 1999) deliberately left unfinished as a symbol of a Europe always under construction, is today an essential part of the city's identity.
In 1988, the Grande Île —the historic centre ringed by the arms of the Ill— was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site, a recognition extended in 2017 to include the German Neustadt as well, celebrating the dialogue between two urban cultures. Today Strasbourg is a university city, prosperous and committed to sustainability, famous for being one of the most cycle-friendly in France and for its modern tram. And every December it revives its best-loved tradition: the Christkindelsmärik, the oldest Christmas market in France, running since 1570, filling with lights and the scent of spices a city that, after centuries of shifting borders, has made its mixed heritage its greatest treasure.