The reflection
The Place de la Bourse front inverted whole on the water.
Photograph by Greg O'Beirne — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Satdeep Gill — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Satdeep Gill — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Bernard Gagnon — CC0
**Just before or after sunrise**, when the place is nearly empty and the reflection comes out clean and complete without feet breaking it — this is the shot you see in magazines. The second option is **shortly after sunset**, when the Bourse façade is lit and the reflection turns gold on black water: more beautiful, if technically harder. Avoid summer midday: the crowd is thick, the reflection broken and the light harsh. And mind the cycle — wait for the flooding phase, not the mist phase.
No. The mirror is **seasonal**, normally running from spring to early autumn, then drained for maintenance over the winter months since freezing damages the installation. It also stops for short maintenance periods through the season. If this is the main reason for your trip to Bordeaux, check before you travel. The good news is that the **Place de la Bourse itself** — the thing being reflected — stands and is lit all year and is worth standing in front of regardless.
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The most famous image to come out of Bordeaux, and in reality just a **slab of granite** covered by a film of water no more than two centimetres deep. But it stands in exactly the right place: directly opposite the **Place de la Bourse** on the bank of the Garonne, so the square's eighteenth-century stone front reflects in it whole and inverted, as though built twice. It was laid in 2006 as part of the riverfront regeneration that turned Bordeaux from a city with its back to its river into one that lives on it. It is the **largest water mirror in the world**, at close to 3,450 square metres. And it does not work in one mode but on a repeating cycle: the slab floods and becomes a mirror, then the water drains and a dense **cloud of mist** rises from the vents, covering everything for a few minutes so that people vanish inside it, then the water returns. Children wait for the mist and run through it; photographers wait for the mirror. It is free and open to everyone, and people wade across it barefoot in summer.
The Place de la Bourse front inverted whole on the water.
A dense fog cycle that swallows people for minutes.
A few centimetres deep — children run through it.
Place de la Bourse, 33000 Bordeaux