St.-Ursen-Bastion

Solothurn's baroque fortifications survive only in fragments, and the St Ursen bastion is one of them — a projecting work of the town's seventeenth-century ramparts, standing below the cathedral of St Ursus whose great flight of steps commands the old town. In summer the bastion becomes a stage: an open terrace with a monumental front behind it, used for staged opera and for choral concerts. Gounod's Faust has been performed there.