Strasbourg: A Complete Guide to the Cathedral, Petite France & the Christmas Capital

Why Visit Strasbourg?

Because it is two countries at once. French street names above German timber framing, a Gothic cathedral built by masons who spoke Alsatian, and a covered market selling both choucroute and foie gras. Strasbourg is what a border looks like after a thousand years of arguing.

A city that changed country five times

Strasbourg became a Free City of the Holy Roman Empire in 1262 and stayed one for four centuries — which is why it built a cathedral and a university instead of a royal palace. In 1681 Louis XIV's army arrived and the citizens recognised him as their king. In 1871 the Germans took it back. In 1918 France took it again. In 1940 Germany again. In 1944 France, for good.

Each owner left something behind. Walk east from the cathedral and the half-timbered lanes stop dead; suddenly you are in the Neustadt, an imperial German quarter of enormous sandstone blocks built to prove a point. Today the city is one of the three capitals of the European Union, which is roughly the least likely outcome anyone could have predicted.

The tallest building on earth for 227 years

The cathedral's north spire reaches 142 metres. From 1647 until 1874 nothing built by human hands stood higher — not in Europe, not anywhere. It is made of pink Vosges sandstone, which is why the whole thing glows rose at sunset and looks bruised in the rain.

The south spire was never built. The masons ran out of money, and then out of certainty. The result is the most famous asymmetry in Gothic architecture: one tower reaching, one stump waiting.

The summer everyone danced

In July 1518 a woman called Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg street and began to dance. She did not stop. Within a week there were thirty-four dancers; within a month, around four hundred. The city council, advised that the cure was more dancing, cleared two guildhalls and hired musicians.

People danced until they collapsed. Contemporary accounts say some died of stroke and exhaustion. Nobody has ever fully explained it — ergot poisoning, mass hysteria, a stress cult; the arguments are still running. It happened here, in these streets, and almost no visitor knows it.

Petite France was never pretty

The postcard quarter with the flower boxes and the leaning timbers was the working end of town: tanners, millers and fishermen, using the river because their trades stank. The name is not romantic either. It comes from a sixteenth-century hospital for soldiers with syphilis — what the Germans called Franzosenkrankheit, the French disease.

The tanners' houses still show it. Those steep open lofts under the roofs were drying racks for hides. Now they hold geraniums.

Capital of Christmas since 1570

The Christkindelsmärik has run since 1570, which makes it the oldest Christmas market in France and one of the oldest in Europe. It began as a Protestant replacement for the Catholic Saint Nicholas fair — a market for the Christ Child instead of the saint. Four and a half centuries later it draws around two million visitors across four weeks and turns the entire island into one lit-up shop.

It is magnificent and it is completely overrun. Come for it deliberately, or come in October and have the same city to yourself.