Things to discover in France

From the 18th century onward, the French Vosges developed into a centre of the wool, linen, and cotton industries. Mountain streams powered watermills and provided the much-needed water for washing, dyeing, and bleaching fabrics.

For the construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, Gustave Eiffel had to source 7,000 tons of iron, iron he found near Nancy in the French region of Lorraine.

In a border village near the German–French frontier lies a slumbering industrial giant where, since the second half of the nineteenth century, coal was extracted on a massive scale.

Snow or no snow, it didn’t matter here. This concrete ski slope from 1961 was fitted with plastic mats, allowing ski jumpers to train all year round.

Near a ski resort in the Vosges, you may stumble upon an unexpected piece of sports history. Hidden among the trees, concrete remnants recall the presence of a monumental ski jumping hill.

A graceful arch bridge, a kilometres-long railway tunnel, and several pedestrian bridges still recall a railway line in France from the 1930s that was never completed.

In the French Moselle, a modest infantry work was built in the early 1930s to protect France against a new German invasion.

A 58-meter-high headframe tower dominates an otherwise anonymous industrial site in the French Moselle. As early as 1931, two deep shafts were dug here to mine coal.

Deep beneath the Lorraine soil in northeastern France lie coal seams that were extensively extracted after the end of the First World War.

The headframe of Puits Vuillemin 2 is more than a century old; it is not only a rare survivor of France's coal-mining past but also a significant architectural and technological artefact in the history of industrialisation in Europe.