Independent Port of Strasbourg Independent Port of Strasbourg The Independent Port of Strasbourg (; P.A.S.) is a port on the Rhine river, in the city of Strasbourg, France. Created in 1926, it is a public transport hub under the control of the French transport ministry. The port is the second biggest river port of France after Paris, and the third largest port on the Rhine after Rotterdam and Duisburg. There are two terminals for containers equipped with 3 multimodal gantry cranes. There are 320 companies located in this independent port, which employs 1,300 persons. The traffic in the port exceeded 6 billion tons for
Strasbourg and home to 13% of the Grand Est region's inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of 915,000 inhabitants in 2014. Strasbourg is one of the "de facto" capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels and Luxembourg), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights, its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and its European Audiovisual Observatory) and the Eurocorps, as well as the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman of the European Union. The city is also the seat of the Central Commission