Love Locks Bridge, Paris, France
This quirky tradition saw tourists flocking to the City of Love to express their amor by signing theirs and their partners’ names on padlocks, before attaching them to the Pont des Arts over the River Seine. The practice became so popular that at one point the bridge contained a million padlocks weighing 45 tons.
In a moment of extreme irony, in 2014 part of its fence broke due to the weight of these symbols of ‘everlasting’ love. The following year, city officials began to remove padlocks and replace the bridge’s metal grilles with plastic panels, which have now been replaced by glass panels. Determined to keep the tradition going, some have begun to attach padlocks to lampposts along the bridge instead.
