Where to stay in Colmar: the old town, Petite Venise and the wine route

Overview

Colmar is a small town with a disproportionately large reputation, and both halves of that matter to a visitor. The old town is a tight knot of half-timbered houses, canals and painted facades that you can cross on foot in fifteen minutes, and it is genuinely as pretty as the photographs. It is also one of the most visited places in eastern France for its size, so in summer and through the Christmas markets the lanes around the canals are full of day-trippers from late morning to late afternoon. The town is at its best early and in the evening, which is the strongest argument for sleeping here rather than visiting from Strasbourg.

The second reason to come is what surrounds it. Colmar sits at the foot of the Vosges in the middle of the Alsace wine route, with villages such as Eguisheim, Turckheim, Kaysersberg, Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé a short drive away. Two days covers the town itself; anything longer is really a stay on the wine route with Colmar as the base. What it is not is a lively city: evenings are quiet, and outside the old center the town is ordinary suburbs and ring roads.

Where to stay

Almost everything worth seeing sits inside a compact, largely pedestrian old town, and the railway station is a 15 to 20 minute walk to its southwest. So the choice is mostly about how close you want to be to the crowds, and whether you will have a car, which decides more than any neighborhood does.

The old town core — Saint-Martin, the Koïfhus and Rue des Marchands

The streets around the Collégiale Saint-Martin, the old customs house (the Koïfhus) and Rue des Marchands, with the Maison Pfister and the Maison des Têtes a few steps away. Stay here on a first visit if you want to walk out of the door into the half-timbered center, reach the Unterlinden museum on foot and have the streets to yourself before the coaches arrive. The trade-off is price and access: rooms are small and expensive for what they are, many buildings are old with steep stairs and no lift, and driving in is awkward, so you will be wheeling luggage across cobbles from a parking lot.

Petite Venise, Krutenau and the Quartier des Tanneurs

The canal-side south of the old town, along the Lauch: the tanners’ quarter with its tall timbered houses, the old fishmongers’ quay beside the covered market, the Krutenau, once the market gardeners’ quarter, and the stretch everyone photographs as Petite Venise. This is the most beautiful part of town to wake up in, and in the evening, once the day visitors leave, it is calm and lovely. Stay here for the setting. The trade-off is that by day it is the single most crowded place in Colmar, the waterside terraces are priced for that crowd, and some of the boat-tour landings make the quays busy right outside your window.

Around the station and the Champ de Mars

The blocks between the railway station and the old town, around the Parc du Champ de Mars and Place Rapp. This is the practical base if you are arriving and leaving by train, using the town for day trips by rail, or watching the budget: rooms are cheaper and larger, and parking is easier. The trade-off is charm and distance — it is a normal nineteenth- and twentieth-century town here, and you walk 10 to 20 minutes to the canals, which is no hardship in summer and less pleasant on a wet December night.

A wine village instead

Eguisheim, Turckheim, Kaysersberg and Riquewihr all have rooms, and staying in one gives you the wine route at dawn and dusk, when it is at its best. Do this only if you have a car: Turckheim is the exception, with a train to Colmar, while the others depend on a limited bus service. The trade-off is that the villages go very quiet at night, with little open after dinner, and in peak season they are as crowded by day as Colmar itself.

When to go

Colmar sits in the rain shadow of the Vosges and is one of the driest towns in France, with warm, sunny summers that can turn hot. Late spring (May–June) and September are the best months: mild, green, and with the vineyards in leaf. September and October are also harvest season on the wine route, which brings its own crowds to the villages on weekends.

July and August are busy and can be hot in the stone streets, though the evenings are long. Late November through December is the Christmas market season, when the town is lit and decorated and the old town hosts five or six markets, from the last week of November to the end of December; it is also the most crowded the town ever gets, with coaches and river-cruise groups arriving daily and rooms booked well ahead. If you come then, come midweek and book early. January to March is cold, gray and very quiet, with some places closed for the winter break — cheap and peaceful, but the vineyards are bare and the villages half-shut.

Getting there & around

Colmar is on the main rail line between Strasbourg and Basel, and the train is the easiest way in. Regional TER trains reach Strasbourg in half an hour to forty minutes and Mulhouse in about twenty minutes, and there are direct high-speed trains to Paris, which makes a car-free trip straightforward. Strasbourg is also a good day trip in its own right.

None of the airports is close. From the EuroAirport, the usual route is the airport bus to Saint-Louis station and a train north to Colmar via Mulhouse. From Strasbourg Airport, a shuttle train runs to Strasbourg station, where you change for Colmar. Allow well over an hour either way. Basel’s main station is also within easy reach by rail, and Freiburg across the Rhine in Germany by road or by bus.

Within the town you walk: the old center is small, much of it pedestrian, and the local buses (the Trace network) are only useful for the station or the outskirts. The car question is really about the wine route. Turckheim and the Munster valley are on a branch line from Colmar station, and regional buses from outside the station reach Kaysersberg and Riquewihr among others, but services are sparse and slow. With a car you can see three or four villages in a day; without one, pick one or two, or join a tasting tour. If you do drive, leave the car in one of the large parking lots around the old town edge rather than trying to get into the center.

Practicalities

Colmar is a safe, easy town. Cards are accepted almost everywhere, though small market stalls and some village wineries prefer cash. Expect many shops to close on Sundays and some restaurants on Sunday evening and Monday; outside the peak seasons, check before you walk across town for dinner. Lunch is served roughly from noon to two and dinner from about seven, and kitchens close earlier than in a big city, so turning up hungry at half past nine can leave you with little choice.

The food is Alsatian and hearty, and the place to eat it is the winstub, the traditional wine tavern. The three dishes to know are choucroute garnie (sauerkraut with sausages and pork), baeckeoffe (meat and potatoes slow-baked in a sealed earthenware dish) and tarte flambée, or flammekueche, a thin crisp base under cream, onions and bacon that is the cheap, shareable option. Munster cheese comes from the valley just west of town, and the kougelhopf, a tall ring-shaped brioche with raisins and almonds, is in every bakery; at Christmas the bakeries fill with bredele, small Christmas cookies baked in many kinds.

The wine is the other reason to be here. Alsace wines are named by grape rather than by place — Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Sylvaner — and the sparkling Crémant d’Alsace is the local aperitif. Tastings at family estates in the wine villages are often free or close to it if you buy a bottle, and the custom is to buy something if you have tasted several.

For sights, the two that justify the trip on their own are the Unterlinden museum, home of the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the Dominican church with Martin Schongauer’s Madonna of the Rose Bower. The sculptor Bartholdi, who designed the Statue of Liberty, was born here, and his house is a museum. You will hear German-sounding place names everywhere and occasionally the Alsatian dialect, but French is what you speak.