Two different faces
The ornament differs between the arch's two sides.
Jean-Louis Lascoux — CC BY-SA 3.0 · PA — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Chabe01 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) — CC BY-SA 3.0
**Five to ten minutes**, no more — it is an arch in the open air; you stand under it, photograph it and move on. But its position is excellent: it stands at **Place Gambetta**, which has a small garden, benches and cafés, and is minutes from the Grand Théâtre to the north and Rue Sainte-Catherine to the east. Make it a stop on a walk starting at the Place de la Comédie and going on to the cathedral and the Pey-Berland tower, and you cover the whole of central Bordeaux on foot in two hours.
All three are gates, but from different eras and with different intent, which is what makes comparing them interesting. The **Grosse Cloche** and the **Porte Cailhau** are medieval: towers, battlements and a defensive look, from a time when the city was walled and feared siege. The **Porte Dijeaux** is from 1748, centuries later, elegantly classical with no defensive function at all — built while the walls were coming down. Seeing all three in a day is watching Bordeaux move from a fortified town to a confident trading city.
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An elegant stone arch standing at the edge of **Place Gambetta** in central Bordeaux, built in **1748** on the site of an older gate in the city wall known as the gate of the thicket. It is not a defensive gate but a **civic triumphal arch**: in the middle of the eighteenth century Bordeaux was pulling down its medieval walls and rebuilding itself as an open city of matching classical stone frontages, and this gate is among the first of those works — an architectural gesture rather than a military one, designed to say that the city had grown rich and confident and was no longer afraid. Its two faces differ in detail, it carries classical ornament and carved capitals, and today it stands in a busy shopping quarter, with people passing beneath it into Rue Porte Dijeaux. It is a **short visit** — a few minutes — but one of the landmarks Bordelais navigate by, and you will pass it moving between the Grand Théâtre, Place Gambetta and Rue Sainte-Catherine.
The ornament differs between the arch's two sides.
A small garden and cafés right beside the gate.
A witness to Bordeaux becoming an open city.
Place Gambetta, 33000 Bordeaux