French City Break: Colmar, Alsace

Often referred to as a fairy tale town, Colmar is surely among the loveliest of the Alsatian towns and villages that satellite Strasbourg – but it is much more than just a pretty face.

As part of the long-disputed Alsace-Lorraine region, grabbed alternately by Germany and France for centuries, Colmar’s rainbow-hued, half-timbered old town seems to have incorporated the best of both countries to arrive at a character all its own. And though its winding cobbled streets are lined with tourist shops, its Renaissance and medieval architecture and outstanding cultural wealth more than make up for it with their inescapable charm. Colmar’s accessibility is part of its allure. About 2.5 hours from Paris by TGV, the city’s old town – the centre of Colmar life for eight centuries – is just 15 minutes on foot from the central train station. It’s likely you’ll have good weather too, as Colmar has one of the sunniest, driest climates in all of France. Indeed its climate and geography informed its destiny. Situated on a fertile plain between the Vosges mountains and the Rhine, the bustling town was a viticultural and agricultural centre, and remains the principal town on the Alsace wine route.

Wine was always a factor in Colmar’s fortunes. The prosperous merchants who traded in wheat and wine in the city’s thriving 15th and 16th centuries built ornate houses befitting their station. Admiring the old town’s deliciously coloured half-timbered houses, overflowing with flower-laden window boxes, can seriously tax your neck muscles. It’s all worth it, though, as the closer you look the more is revealed of life in Colmar in its medieval and Renaissance heyday.

A walk on the wildly pretty side

Colmar is the quintessential town for strolling, as everything is on a human scale and easily viewed from street level: its architecture, charming iron signage marking the function of shops from bakers to pharmacies, its quaint antiques stores and tearooms and the gangly storks that nest in church belfries and rooftops. The old town is made up of several districts bisected by the Lauch River and dominated by the Collégiale Saint-Martin, a Roman Catholic church constructed in the Gothic style between 1234 and 1365 and desacralised after the French Revolution. The pretty squares, walkways and gardens around the church were reopened this spring on the site of a reclaimed car park.

Most of Colmar’s sites are reachable within a 10-minute walk from Saint-Martin, including the informative Musée des Vins d’Alsace and Musée Gourmand du Chocolat, which are housed together in a single building. Just follow the Statue of Liberty trail embedded in the sidewalks, a nod to native son Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor whose best-known work is New York’s famous landmark. If one could point to any house in Colmar that embodies its folk tale ambience, look no further than Maison Pfister. Built by a well-to-do hatter in 1537, this corner structure seems to gather more than its share of the town’s architectural marvels in one building, from its ornately sculpted two-storey oriel-the carved-wood bay windows characteristic of Colmar’s medieval and Renaissance-era mansions to the arched Gothic arcades, wooden galleries, scalloped turret and expressive murals of religious scenes and Teutonic emperors tattooed on every surface. So picturesque is the exterior, it’s clearly recognisable as the namesake edifice in the hit Japanese anime movie Howl’s Moving Castle.

Colmar’s other eye-popping house, the German Renaissance-style Maison des Têtes (now a luxury hotel), flouts the reigning architectural norms of the day with its Gothic gingerbread-house gables and 106 expressive sculpted heads. The stone and terracotta house is topped by the effigy of a stylised pewter cook, which was conceived by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and added nearly 300 years later. Bartholdi’s childhood home is now a museum dedicated to the sculptor’s life and work. You can see evidence of his talent around town in several fountains, and at the Place de l’Ancienne Douane his sculpture of a medieval general marks the entrance to the tanning district and the start of Little Venice, Colmar’s most picture-postcard district.

Follow the canal at the Rue des Tanneurs, jammed with cafés and boutiques, to the Quai de la Poissonnerie, and across a picturesque bridge where you will find the charming covered market. Open six days a week, this is the place to load up on freshly baked bretzels (pretzels), Kougelhopf and other Alsatian specialities, along with fresh produce and the usual French market fare. You can grab a bite at one of the market’s café stands inside or nab a coveted spot alongside the canal for a seenic lunch watching tourist-heavy boats go by. You can easily explore this picturesque district in an hour or two, but if you can spare an extra 40 minutes for a boat ride you’ll get another view of the festive Crayola-coloured structures that line the canal and a commentary on the marketers, fishermen and wine merchants for whom the canal was once so integral to daily life and trade.

Cultural allure

Doubling back through town you’ll find two pilgrimage-worthy spots, the Dominican Library and the Unterlinden Museum, one of France’s most popular small museums for its exceptional collection of medieval and early Renaissance paintings and sculptures from the likes of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach, But the star of the museum is painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, looking radiant after a top-to-toe restoration last year. The soaring, multi-panel 16th-century altarpiece is housed in a 13th-century Dominican convent which was updated and expanded in 2015 during a complete remodel that added underground galleries and a passage to Colmar’s historic bath house, which is now home to the museum’s fine modern and contemporary collections. The Dominican Library, which is also housed in the convent (a serene 13th-century cloister well worth exploring), reopened two years ago after a hi-tech makeover that added state-of-the-art lighting and cases for the library’s standout collection of ancient books and manuscripts, a must-see while visiting.

Picturesque Colmar seems made for the festive season so it’s little surprise that its lavish citywide December markets draw crowds from across Europe and beyond. That’s one reason to go in spring or autumn when crowds are thinner and the buildings are radiant against a clear blue sky. The old town can be easily traversed on foot in a few hours, though to see all the town has to offer, it’s worth spending at least a day or two. Stop in at the tourist office just opposite the entrance to the Unterlinden museum for a map of the sites to be found in each of the town’s districts and discover the fairy tale for yourself.

COLMAR ESSENTIALS

GETTING THERE

BY TRAIN

• Colmar is an easy two- to three-hour trip from Paris’ Gare de l’Est via Strasbourg.

WHERE TO SHOP

• There are some top-notch wine shops in Colmar clustered around the Collégiale Saint-Martin: La Sommelière and Le Cercle des Arômes are two good ones. To taste Alsatian wines and shop for wine books you can’t beat the charming Le Chat Perché bookstore and wine bar offering 80 local wines by the glass to choose from. You can also sample Domaine Karcher’s wines made from the local varietals at their tasting room. For freshly baked local cookies, macarons and a several kinds of Kougelhopf, the Maison Alsacienne de Biscuiterie is a good bet and they have several boutiques around Colmar. For fresh pretzels right out of the oven, head to the covered market.

WHERE TO STAY & EAT

• Housed in one of the city’s architectural marvels. La Maison des Têtes is the best lodging in town, though you may experience some cognitive dissonance walking from its charming interior courtyard into a thoroughly contemporary hotel bereft of the Renaissance mansion’s original interiors. You will find all the luxury amenities. however, including two excellent restaurants: a traditional brasserie with a courtyard and the superb Michelin-starred gastronomic Girardin, which celebrates the best Alsatian produce.
• Restaurant Quai 21: Dine on wonderfully creative seasonal dishes in the bright interior or outside on the Petite Venise quai overlooking the river. For a quality traditional Alsatian meal, the outdoor terrace at Winstub Brenner, also in Petite Venise, is a delight on warm days.

CONTACTS

• Tourist office: Place Unterlinden, 68000 Colmar, France. www.tourisme-colmar.com/en

From France Today Magazine