Belfort

Continuing with my Easter vacation series, day two of my vacation saw us travel from Baden-Baden to Belfort, an industrial city in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of north western France.

Belfort is an historically, strategically important city given its location between the Rhine and the Rhône, and it is also situated between the major French cities of Strasbourg and Lyon, it's also a stone's throw away from the Swiss border. Belfort is known for heavy industry and is the home of Alstom, a major railway company which produced the first TGVs (speed trains).

Belfort is the former hometown of my partner who had lived and worked there for years after having studied his studies in France so this trip was mainly an opportunity for him to meet-up with old friends and colleagues who very kindly gave us a place to stay and invited us to eat. While Belfort isn't the most beautiful French city, I can't complain about the hospitality and the suburbs really are a beautiful place place to settle down.

We arrived in Belfort by train and the first stop was lunch. We visited an Indian restaurant not far from the train station and while the food wasn't the finest of Indian cuisine, it was yummy and was really, really well priced and our waitress was truly charming.

After meeting up with some of my partner's former colleagues, we visited the Belfort Citadel, a grand fort built on top of a large hill, the highest point in the city. The climb was made tricky by the heatwave that day but the view from the top was worth it, I struggled to see beauty in the city at ground level but beauty can be found from above! The absolute highlight of my trip, however, is to be found halfway up the hill, at the foot of the fort, namely the Lion of Belfort. This 11 metre high sandstone lion dominates the Belfort skyline and offers a truly magnificant sight from street level but when you're stood just beneath it, its grand scale is rather breathtaking.

The Lion is the work of Frédéric Bartholdi, the renowned sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. The Lion symbolises the French resistance during the Siege of Belfort, a Prussian attack, in 1870-71 in which 17,000 local men protected the city from 40,000 invading Prussians. Like other famous French landmarks, most notably the Arc de Triomph, the Lion of Belfort has replicas in other French cities including Paris and Montreal.