Tour de Drince, Observation tower in Rombas, France.
The Tour de Drince is a 25-metre steel observation tower with a pyramidal base, standing at 390 metres altitude on the Drince ridge in Rombas, on the border with Pierrevillers. It has eleven landings of eleven steps each: the first ten lead to a wide platform 22 metres above ground, and an eleventh landing reaches a smaller upper platform at 24.2 metres, with its railing at 25 metres. Four steel cables anchored in the ground brace the structure.
The Rombas section of the Club vosgien planned an observation tower from 1900 and bought land at Drince in 1904, but lacking funds built a 25-metre wooden tower to engineer Schneider's plans. The German military administration burned it at the start of the 1914-1918 war. The club, recreated in 1929, used 11,000 francs in war damages and a lottery of 5 May 1932 to fund a 25-metre steel tower by Jost et Collot Frères of Amnéville, completed in the workshop on 5 August 1932 and hauled up as sixteen tonnes of iron.
The tower is nicknamed "the other Iron Lady" and is tied to the childhood memories of many Rombas residents. It was built with steel from the Rombas factory, which has since disappeared, making it a witness to Lorraine's industrial history.
The tower stands on the Drince ridge at 390 m, on the Rombas side of the boundary with Pierrevillers, and is a stop on the GR5 long-distance trail. Access is on foot; the steel structure has eleven flights of eleven steps, with the main platform at 22 m and a smaller upper platform at 24.20 m.
From the highest platform, visitors can see over 80 kilometers across landscapes in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Ardennes on clear days. This far-reaching view allows visitors to observe multiple countries and their different landscapes from a single location.
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