Grand'Place & Place des Héros
Arras owns two of the most theatrical town squares in northern France — a pair of cobbled Flemish Baroque masterpieces lined with 155 gabled facades that survived WWI only to be painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone. Strolling between them feels like stepping into a gilded stage set.
A Baroque stage set in stone
The Grand'Place and the adjoining Place des Héros are separated only by the soaring Hôtel de Ville belfry, and together they form one of the largest ensembles of Flemish Renaissance architecture in the world. Every façade is slightly different — count the pilasters, the scrolled gables, the lion-head keystones.
Remarkably, almost everything you see is a faithful 1920s reconstruction. After WWI artillery reduced the city to rubble, Arras rebuilt its heart using the original 17th-century plans, a feat of collective memory that UNESCO recognised by listing the belfry as a World Heritage site.
Best times and hidden angles
Come at dusk on a clear evening when the warm floodlights turn the honey-coloured stone amber and the café terraces hum with locals sipping Pelforth. The weekly Saturday market floods the Grand'Place with colour and gives the squares their true, lived-in soul.
For the best photograph, climb the Hôtel de Ville belfry (€3.50, open daily) and look straight down onto the geometric cobblestone pattern — a shot that rarely appears on postcards but reliably stuns on Instagram.
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