The Happy Blog

Now’s the time to delve into the districts’ names, something we more rarely have the chance to talk about during our free walking Tours. These names indeed appear along the way as they are born and thus follow a historical logic. There is also an aspect of practical designation: they should help you find your way easily!

Strasbourg has always been a city of canals. Built in the origin between two arms of the Ill river, on an island called nowadays the Great Island, it had many more canals. The successive phases of urban planning along with some changes in their use led to them being displaced, covered or simply to disappear.

This is the continuation and conclusion of our series dedicated to the main square (see previous post). By the end of that last note, we still won’t be done with it entirely. Yet, if I entertain myself by telling you all of it in these pages, how can I hope to arouse enough curiosity in you that you will get up from your couch and come frolic with Happy Strasbourg?

This is the third part in our series dedicated to the Kléber square, we find here a troubled century and the birth of an urban area. But we will also see that some issues are nothing new…

In the previous article (Kléber Square 1), we have discussed the quite recent transformations of Strasbourg’s main square, then we started digging there, just a few meters deep. I now suggest we keep on going back in time together by delving further into the place’s strata.

This is today the main square in Strasbourg, possibly you walk here every day and yet… Do you have the faintest idea where you set foot? On what? Or, should I say, on whom?But let us go back in time a…