Cobble Gobble

ENDE

France · Old Town

Strasbourg

A self-guided walking tour of the Strasbourg Old Town, every street in one day.

Every street on the menu.

Every street in the Old Town of Strasbourg is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.

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At a glance

Plan your walk.

Distance
28.1 km
Time
about 8 hours
Streets
157
Steps
2 streets with steps
Start point
Cathédrale Notre-Dame
Phone needed while walking
no
Works offline
yes
Expires
never

The Old Town

Every street, drawn.

Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

  • Cathédrale Notre-Dame 1,500 points

    Pink sandstone, and you will pick it out from streets away well before you stand under it. Three hundred and thirty steps get you onto the platform. Then back at ground level, once a day at a fixed hour, something in the south transept begins to move. I am not telling you what. Main course.

  • Église protestante Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune 500 points

    Walk round the side and find the cloister. It is older than the walls above it, and hardly anyone goes through. Then step in and look up: the vaulting is painted from one end to the other, and you will be a while.

  • Église protestante Saint-Thomas 500 points

    Five aisles, all of them the same height, and the only one in Alsace built like that. The organ is a Silbermann and Mozart played on it. Step out again and the water is right against the masonry: this is the corner where the noise stops. I would lie here.

  • Église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux 500 points

    One roof, two churches, a wall down the middle. Catholics on one side, Lutherans on the other, sharing the place for three hundred years and more. In 2012 somebody put a door through the wall. Count the ways in as you go round.

  • Opéra du Rhin 500 points

    Columns across the front and a row of figures along the roof, every one of them looking out across the open ground at everybody else. See it from the far end, walking towards it. That is the view it was put there for.

  • Palais Rohan 500 points

    It backs onto the water, and the river side is the one it was built to be seen from. Hardly anybody walks round to look. Three museums live in there, and the oldest things in the city are down in the cellars, which is the correct place for old things.

  • Ancienne douane 250 points

    Stand on the crossing opposite and take in the length of it. It is a shed, it has never pretended otherwise, and after a morning of decorated fronts that comes as a relief. The waterside is the good side. Everything here used to face the water.

  • Aubette 1928 250 points

    The long pale face on the biggest square of this level, and the least interesting part of the whole thing. What is worth the detour is up the stairs and invisible from the pavement. Two street names a minute away belong to the people who did it.

  • Église Saint-Étienne 250 points

    The far east corner, and the emptiest walking on this level. Roman masonry turned up under the floor in here, found by people who were looking for something else. Out and back is a long way, and every metre of it counts.

  • Hôtel de la Préfecture 250 points

    You are not going in this one. It has a job. So all you get of it is the outside, and the outside is enough: the railings, the gates, and a run of stone that keeps going for longer than you expect.

  • Hôtel de Ville 250 points

    A private mansion before the council moved in, and it never quite stopped looking like one. The gateway was cut for carriages, not for people. Stand in the middle of it and look up, before somebody drives through.

  • Ponts Couverts 250 points

    The far west end, where the water splits into four arms and one crossing follows straight on from the next. Twenty paces past them is the Vauban dam, and the terrace on its top is where the picture you have already seen was taken from. Go up, turn round, come down, then eat the crossings properly.

  • Tour du Bourreau 250 points

    Off on its own at the west end, squat and heavy, with the river on two sides. Everything around it has been rebuilt at least once and this has not. Put a hand on the stone as you pass. Six centuries of weather is a texture, and texture is most of what I have.

Eating

Actual food.

Nobody here cooked from scratch on a Monday if they could avoid it. It was wash day, so the sealed pot went down the lane to the baker and came back out of his oven at noon. Sunday's boiled meat got rolled up in noodle dough and sliced. The flat tart went in on whatever heat was left after the bread came out. A kitchen built on somebody else's fire and yesterday's dinner, and the names on the menu are still German while the menu is French.

Meat and fish

Vegetarian

  • Kougelhopf

    A yeast brioche baked in a tall fluted ring, almonds set into the crown, raisins through the crumb, powdered sugar over the top. Alsace has kept the moulds since at least the 18th century, which is longer than it has kept any one story about where the thing came from. Breakfast, and again after dinner.

    Sources: Le Gourmeur, Visit Alsace (Alsace Destination Tourisme), Pokaa

  • Munster

    A soft cheese with a washed rind, ripened in damp cellars until the crust turns orange. Two towns made the same cheese and both names stuck: Munster on this side of the mountains, Géromé on the other. You will know it has arrived before the plate does.

    Ask about the rennet if that matters to you. It is a farmhouse cheese and the answer is usually the traditional one.

    Sources: INAO (Institut national de l'origine et de la qualité)

  • Bredele

    Small biscuits made from a dry dough, cut with a wheel or a cutter, piped through a nozzle, or pressed through a mincer for the ridged ones. The recipes come down through families, and every house keeps its own list of which shapes count. Hundreds of them exist and no two kitchens agree.

    Seasonal. Christmas and the weeks running up to it, and then the tins go away again.

    Sources: Le Gourmeur, Visit Alsace (Alsace Destination Tourisme), Pokaa

Vegan

Two, and the fermenting barrel is doing most of the work. Alsace built its kitchen on the pig, the milk cow and the egg, and nearly everything written down here carries one of the three. What stands without them is the cabbage, the bread and the fruit off the trees. That is real food and it is a short list. Plant kitchens are all over Strasbourg now. They simply arrived after the recipes were written down.

  • Choucroute

    The most famous thing on any menu in this city is cabbage. Shredded, salted, packed into vats and left to ferment on its own, and that is the whole method. The protected name covers the cabbage and nothing else. Everything that usually turns up on top of it is somebody else's idea.

    Choucroute garnie arrives buried under pork. Ask for the cabbage on its own or as a side, and ask what it was cooked in.

    Sources: INAO (Institut national de l'origine et de la qualité)

  • Bretzel

    Flour, water, salt and yeast, knotted like two folded arms, dipped in a soda bath before baking so the crust comes out dark and glossy. The bakers here took it as their own sign in the late 1400s, when they split off from the pastry trade. A guild badge you are allowed to eat.

    The traditional dough here has butter in it. Ask the bakery before you count on it.

    Sources: Le Gourmeur, Visit Alsace (Alsace Destination Tourisme), Pokaa

Late breakfast

  • Bistrot et Chocolat come for the one thing: the gluten free pastry

    8 Rue de la Râpe

    A meat free house on a back lane two minutes from the cathedral, fitted out like a small grocer's shop, with blankets on the terrace when it turns cold. Plates run ten to sixteen euros, it is all made in the kitchen here, and the gluten free pastry is not an afterthought. Nothing on this card has ever been near the Monday pot.

    • Mon11:00–19:00
    • Tue11:00–19:00
    • Wed11:00–19:00
    • Thu11:00–19:00
    • Fri11:00–21:00
    • Sat10:00–21:00
    • Sun10:00–19:00

    No reservations, at all. The kitchen runs straight through from eleven on a weekday and from ten at the weekend, and everything stops at seven.

    Sources: Pokaa, Le Bonbon, Visit Alsace (Alsace Destination Tourisme)

Afternoon coffee

  • Café Bretelles Krutenau the old one

    57 Rue de Zurich

    The city's first specialty coffee shop opened behind this door in March 2014, on rue de Zurich in the Krutenau, off the island and out of the crowd. Small, warm, and the plate of the day is nine euros, cooked in this branch's own kitchen and always plant based. There is a second Bretelles over in Petite France. This is the one that started it.

    • Mon08:00–18:00
    • Tue08:00–18:00
    • Wed08:00–18:00
    • Thu08:00–18:00
    • Fri08:00–18:00
    • Sat09:00–18:00
    • Sun09:00–17:00

    Open every day, and shut by six. No booking for breakfast, but call ahead if you want the plate of the day.

    Sources: Pokaa, Or Norme, Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques

Dinner

  • Au Pont Corbeau where locals go

    21 Quai Saint-Nicolas

    Renaissance panelling, heavy tables and a lunch menu at thirteen euros fifty, right beside the folk art museum. A father and daughter run it between them, she cooks, and the food is the regional plate played straight: sauerkraut, potato fritters, grilled ham hock. It shuts on a Saturday, which tells you who it is actually for.

    Closed all day Saturday, and there is no lunch on Sunday. The room is small and fills up, so ring ahead.

    Sources: Le Fooding, Le Gourmeur

Checked 5 September 2026.

Name origin

Why it is called Strasbourg.

Argentoratum was the Roman name for the camp on this spot. After Rome went, the Alamans looked at the same ground and called it Strateburgum, the town of the roads, and that is the name that stuck. A whole town named after its roads. Nobody has ever handed me a better menu.

Sources: www.larousse.fr; www.strasbourg.eu

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Two Roman roads met here, one coming up from Basel and one heading off towards Metz by Saverne, and the camp went in where they crossed. The Ill did the rest of the work. It was about a hundred metres wide then, three times what you see now, and it closed the south side without anybody having to build a thing. Roads on one side, water on the other. I would have picked it too.

Sources: www.larousse.fr; www.musees.strasbourg.eu

Why then

When the first stone went down.

Twelve years before the calendar starts. The Romans put a camp on this ground in 12 BC and called it Argentoratum. The plan you are walking is younger than the founding: the Eighth Legion arrived at the end of the first century and built the version whose outline is still down there. A founding date and a street plan are hardly ever the same age.

Sources: www.strasbourg.eu; www.musees.strasbourg.eu

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

12 BC–400

Rome. A camp went up in 12 BC and the legions stayed for something like four hundred years. By the fourth century the walls had reached their largest, and that is the outline still lying under the modern streets. Everything built here since has been set down on a rectangle drawn by men who were told where to put it.

Sources: www.strasbourg.eu; www.musees.strasbourg.eu

982–1201

The bishop. In 982 the emperor Otto II handed him the powers of a count, which made him the real sovereign of Strasbourg, and for two centuries the man in the cathedral was also the man who ran the town. Then the better-off townspeople went looking for a bigger patron than their bishop, and they found one.

Sources: www.larousse.fr

1201–1681

The town itself. In 1201 the emperor Philip of Swabia declared it a free imperial city, with nobody in between. A charter around 1214 set up a council of nobles and burghers to administer the place, and in 1332 the craft guilds pushed twenty-five seats of their own into it. Four hundred and eighty years of a town arguing with itself about who sits where. It ended on 30 September 1681.

Sources: www.larousse.fr

1681–1870

France. Louis XIV put an end to its independence on 30 September 1681, annexing the city to the kingdom as part of his policy of reunions. Nearly two centuries followed in which nobody asked who this island belonged to. Quiet centuries are the ones I remember least, and I have had a lot of practice at remembering.

Sources: www.larousse.fr; www.strasbourg.eu

1870–

Then everybody, in turn. The city belonged to the German Empire from 1870 to 1918 and was annexed again from 1940 to 1944, so by its own reckoning it changed nationality four times between 1870 and 1945. It has been French since, and it now houses European institutions that exist because of all that. I am a rock. I stayed where I was.

Sources: www.strasbourg.eu

The emblem

What the shield means.

Not a shield, this one. Strasbourg's arms are silver with a single red band running across, and they are the bishopric's own arms with the two colours swapped over, which is a confident way to treat your landlord's flag. Fine on cloth, unreadable at the size of an icon. So the glyph is the cathedral and its one finished tower instead. The city's own description says that is the thing which draws the silhouette everybody recognises.

Sources: fr.wikipedia.org; www.strasbourg.eu

Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

  1. Four of the streets on this level are a Roman camp. Rue des Hallebardes, carried on by Rue des Juifs, is the via praetoria, the main way in. Rue Brûlée runs along the camp's inner ring road, the one the legion used to get round the wall quickly. Rue des Veaux sits on the rampart itself. The camp is gone. Its floor plan is still being walked on, two thousand years after the last person needed it.

    Sources: www.musees.strasbourg.eu

  2. Gutenberg spent about ten years here, traceable from 1434, living out by the old Saint-Arbogast monastery and making engraved metal badges for pilgrims. When his partners took him to court, witnesses let things slip: a new art, a press, forms of metal. He left in the middle of the 1440s and printed his famous book somewhere else. A square and a street here carry his name, which is what a town does about the one that got away.

    Sources: lirenotremonde.strasbourg.eu

  3. What is protected here is not a building. It is the island. The Grande Île went onto the world heritage list in 1988, whole, and in 2017 the listing was stretched across the water over the Neustadt as well. The city's protection plan grew with it, from 73 hectares to 210. Everything under your feet today sits inside the smaller number.

    Sources: www.culture.gouv.fr

Street words

What the names on the signs mean.

Rue
The ordinary word for a street, and here it is followed by a job more often than by a person. Orfèvres are goldsmiths, Cordonniers shoemakers, Serruriers locksmiths, Tonneliers coopers, Charpentiers carpenters. Walking this island is reading a list of who worked where.
Ruelle
A street too small to be called a street. Ruelle des Roses, Ruelle de l'Esprit, Ruelle des Pelletiers, Ruelle de l'Abreuvoir. The same number of dots per metre as a boulevard, and packed a great deal closer together.
Impasse
A dead end. Impasse du Paon, Impasse des Échasses, Impasse de la Corneille, Impasse des Maçons. In, look, back out again. I have never forgiven whoever thought of them.
Quai
The bank of the water, and there is a lot of water. Quai des Moulins had the mills, Quai au Sable had the sand, Quai de la Bruche takes the name of another river. A quai is flat and straight and long, which after an hour of lanes is a rest.
Marché
A market, and the island still says what each one sold. Poissons is fish, Cochons de Lait is suckling pig, Grains is grain, Gayot is a surname. There was a time you could tell each of them apart with your eyes shut.
Fossé
A ditch. Rue du Fossé des Tailleurs and Rue du Fossé des Tanneurs both run where water once ran, in front of a wall that is no longer there. The town filled them in and carried on walking the line.
Bain
A bath. Rue du Bain aux Plantes, Rue du Bain-aux-Roses, Cour du Bain des Juifs. Three of them inside a few minutes' walk, and every one named after what went into the water.

The size of it

Walk it in a day: Strasbourg in numbers.

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

  • 157streets
  • 1,428dots
  • 22.9km of street
  • 28.1km on foot
  • 8hours at a stroll

Nearby

Old Towns close to this one.

The game

Your first city is free.

Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.

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