Hohenzollern Bridge, Cologne · Travel Poster

Not just a view, the heritage behind it. Ella writes about the place, its hidden history, and the details that never make it into the guidebooks, all printed on the poster.

The love locks covering Cologne's Hohenzollern Bridge look like an age-old tradition, but the first one only went up in late summer 2008. Couples started clipping engraved padlocks to the railings and throwing the keys into the Rhine below, and the habit spread so fast that within three years there were already forty thousand of them. Engineers now monitor the accumulated weight of all that metal, mindful of what happened in Paris, where a bridge railing eventually buckled under the same idea. Cologne decided to let the locks stay rather than clear them, so the collection just keeps growing.

An original illustration, available in colour or black and white, created for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.

Please note that, to protect the original artwork from copyright infringement, the images shown on this website are low resolution. The poster you receive is printed in high resolution, with all the detail and clarity of the original.