Things to do
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Barrage Vauban
Vauban built this weir across the Ill in 1690 so that the sluices could flood the ground south of the city and stop an attack. Its roof terrace is open and free and gives the postcard view back over the covered bridges to the cathedral. A gallery of stone statuary from the cathedral runs underneath.
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Bâtiment Louise-Weiss
A glass drum with a deliberately unfinished tower, seat of the European Parliament since 1999, which meets here in plenary for a handful of weeks each year and in Brussels the rest. Visits to the chamber are free but must be booked and require identification. The canal walk out from the Orangerie takes half an hour.
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Cathédrale Notre-Dame
Pink Vosges sandstone and a single spire finished in 1439, which left it the tallest building on earth until the nineteenth century, the second tower never having been built. The west front carries a stone screen of figures worth an hour on its own. An astronomical clock inside performs at half past twelve.
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Maison Kammerzell
A merchant's house of 1427 on the cathedral square, its upper floors rebuilt in carved oak in 1589 with seventy-five windows and biblical and classical figures on every beam. It is now a restaurant, so the ground floor can be walked into. The carving repays standing across the square with a long look up.
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Musée alsacien
Three old houses knocked together on the far bank, arranged as a set of Alsatian interiors reached by galleried courtyards and low stairs: painted furniture, printed moulds for gingerbread, a Jewish rural room, the tools of daily rural work. The building is as much of the exhibit as its contents. Duck at the doorways.
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Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain
Adrien Fainsilber's glass hall on the far bank of the Ill, holding Kandinsky, Ernst and a room given to Gustave Doré, who was born in the city and is better known here for painting than for engraving. A photography collection rotates downstairs. The rooftop cafe faces straight back at the covered bridges.
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Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame
The workshop that has maintained the cathedral since the thirteenth century keeps its archive here, which means the original sculpture taken down for safety, the medieval parchment drawings of the facade and the oldest surviving figurative stained glass in Europe. Rooms open onto a Gothic garden. Come here after the cathedral and the west front becomes legible.
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Neustadt
After 1871 the German empire laid out a new capital for Alsace north of the medieval island: monumental avenues, a vast imperial palace, a university and blocks of apartments in sandstone and brick. Unesco added it to the old town's listing in 2017. Walking it explains the century that followed better than any museum here.
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Palais Rohan
Built in the 1730s for a prince-bishop of the Rohan family who wanted Paris on the Rhine, and it holds three museums at once: decorative arts in the state rooms, fine arts above, archaeology in the cellars. One ticket covers all three. The river front is the side to look at.
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Parc de l'Orangerie
The oldest park in the city, laid out in 1692 and given a pavilion for Joséphine de Beauharnais, with a lake, a boating pond and a small free zoo. A stork enclosure has bred the bird that is the emblem of Alsace back from near disappearance. The parliament stands across the road.
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Petite France
Tanners, millers and fishermen worked this corner of the island where the Ill divides into channels, and their steep-roofed timber houses have open lofts under the eaves for drying hides. Locks still operate on the water. It is the most photographed quarter and repays being walked at breakfast time or after dark.
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Place Kléber
The main square, named for a general born a few streets away and buried under his own statue in the middle of it. An eighteenth-century arcade closes the north side. From late November it holds the tall tree of the Christkindelsmärik, the Christmas market that has run in this city since 1570.
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Ponts couverts
Three square towers left from the fourteenth-century wall, standing over a set of bridges that lost their wooden roofs in the eighteenth century and kept the name anyway. They close the western end of the island. The view of them, and of the cathedral behind, is taken from the terrace of the dam just upstream.