The Tanners' House
The quarter's most famous house, roofs once open for drying hides — now a waterside restaurant.
Gzen92 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dietmar Rabich — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Myrabella — CC BY-SA 3.0 · JoachimKohler-HB — CC BY-SA 4.0
The name is less romantic than its picture: it comes from a sixteenth-century hospital here for patients of the 'French disease', as Germans then called it. History moves on, the pretty name stays — most visitors never learn the origin, perhaps for the best.
They complement: the covered boat gives quarter and city from the water in comfort (locks included — the children's favourite), the walk gives you the pauses and corners. If only one: walk here, and save the boat for a tired or wet day.
The old houses are Alsatian winstubs serving tarte flambée and choucroute — take a waterside table and accept tourist prices for the setting, or walk two streets out for local ones.
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'Little France' is the quarter Strasbourg gets photographed from: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century half-timbered houses with huge sloping roofs, leaning over the channels of the Ill where the tanners, millers and fishermen worked — the tall open roofs were for drying hides. Today it is the heart of the UNESCO-listed Grande Île: cobbled lanes, small bridges and weirs, Alsatian restaurants filling the old houses, geranium balconies over the water. Its finest corners are Place Benjamin-Zix, the Pont Saint-Martin and the Tanners' House. Walking it without a map is the correct method — the quarter is small enough to circle in half an hour, and worth twice that in stops, photographs and a sit by the water.
The quarter's most famous house, roofs once open for drying hides — now a waterside restaurant.
The quarter's heart, cafés beneath the timbered houses.
Water splitting and rushing under little bridges — the quarter's constant music.
Petite France quarter, 67000 Strasbourg