Travel Guide Freiburg Im Breisgau

Near the French and Swiss borders, Fribourg is a beautiful city of the Black Forest, very student (25 000 on more than 230 000 inhabitants) and dynamic. Its centre, with its pedestrian cobbled streets and its Bächle (small ditch in all the streets, which used to serve as water for the animals) are charming, and the promenade on the Schlossberg, in the middle of the forest and yet in the city, offers a splendid view. Fribourg is a city especially loved by tourists, and it is surely here that the most French will cross! Because the neighbouring Alsace are happy to spend their weekend… it is also one of Germany's cities that enjoy the largest number of sunny days per year.HistoryThe history of the city of Fribourg begins around 1090, when the counts of Zähringen build a castle on the Schlossberg; then, in 1120, grant a charter of rights to the inhabitants of the town below. The city experienced strong growth in the late th century, obtained new rights; then the University (currently the first employer in the city) was founded in 1457.Fribourg's history did not go smoothly, the pogroms against Jews in the th century, the long decades of wars in the th and th centuries, where several times the city was besieged and its population decimated. She often changed hands, mostly French or Austrian, before finally returning to the Kingdom of Baden in 1805, thanks to the Treaty of Presbourg. The 1944 th century was a new period of expansion and industrialization, but the two world wars were synonymous with heavy bombing, the most devastating of which was the end of. Today, Fribourg has become an important cluster of research and industry related to sustainable development, with one of the main solar panels in Europe, and the Vauban district, the former French military base from 1945 to 1992, which was converted into one of the first écoquartiers in the world.