Amorous couples, here's your chance to own a piece of the world's most romantic city: Paris is selling off the "love locks" that lovebirds attached to the city's bridges before officials cracked down on the practice.
Did Barack and Michelle Obama sneak onto the Pont des Arts during a 2009 trip to Paris and attach a love lock? A Parisian artist who found it believes so and he says all the evidence suggests it's really theirs.
Tour companies charging tourists over €100 for love lock tours on Paris bridges (plus a glass of Champagne) have outraged the public, who have mobilized online to try and shut them down.
With Paris set to install glass panels on the Pont des Arts bridge to fight off the scourge of the love locks, an architect from the UK tells The Local he has come up with a much better solution.
IN PICTURES: As around 1 million love locks are pulled down from the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, artists have been employed to fill the gaps with paintings. But not all are impressed by what they've come up with.
Paris, known worldwide as the city of romance, on Monday began the process of removing nearly one million "love-locks", padlocks chained to the city's bridges by love-struck couples. Many in the city say the "heart-breaking" move is long overdue.
Whether or not you're a fan of love locks, you can't say there is anything romantic about the once-picturesque bridges that cross the River Seine in the heart of Paris, now covered in graffiti and in a state of disrepair.
'Love locks' have become such a problem in Paris the city has just installed panels intended to block couples from latching their passion to the town's infrastracture, leaving it straining under a dangerous load.
Thousands of love-locks that adorn bridges in Paris have been removed due to the dangers posed to the public, the Town Hall announced this week, but authorities say they will not impose a ban on the romantic ritual.
Sometimes too much love can be a bad thing as Paris discovered on Sunday when thousands of "locks of love" attached to a footbridge caused part of the railing to collapse, forcing an evacuation.
For the first of our "Reader's Rants" series, in which we offer you a platform to air your views, we hear from two Americans who have fallen out of love with Paris's love locks, claiming they are a stain on the City of Light. Respond with your own rant below.
They say you can't beat City Hall, but Paris authorities who once took a dim view of the thousands of "love locks" adorning the bridges of the Seine river have had a change of heart.
