Things to do
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Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg
A red sandstone fortress on a ridge at seven hundred and fifty metres, ruined for two centuries and then rebuilt by Wilhelm II between 1900 and 1908 as a statement about German Alsace, which is why it looks so complete. The plain of the Rhine and the Black Forest lie below. Half an hour north by car.
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Collégiale Saint-Martin
Yellow sandstone from Rouffach, built between 1234 and 1365, with a south door showing the architect at work with his tools and a green-tiled roof over the crossing. Colmar has no bishop, so it is a collegiate church and never a cathedral, a distinction the town is careful about. Open through the day.
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Couvent des Dominicains
Bare walls, tall clear windows and almost no ornament, which is what a preaching order wanted, and at the end of it Schongauer's Virgin in the Rose Bower of 1473, small and intensely coloured against the plainness. The painting was stolen in 1972 and recovered a year later. A modest entry fee applies.
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Koïfhus
The old customs house of 1480, where goods entering the town were taxed on the ground floor while the ten allied Alsatian cities met upstairs to settle their common business. Its glazed roof tiles and outside stair are original. The square in front holds the wine market in summer and a Christmas market in winter.
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Maison des Têtes
German Renaissance from 1609, its facade carrying one hundred and six grotesque heads and masks around the windows, which is how it got the name. Bartholdi added the cooper on the gable much later. It works as a hotel and restaurant now, so the courtyard can be walked into without a booking.
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Maison Pfister
A hatter built this in 1537 with money from silver mines, and its corner oriel, wooden gallery and painted panels of German emperors made it the model that later Alsatian merchants copied. It stands at the junction of the rue des Marchands and is still lived in. The ground floor is a wine shop.
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Marché couvert
Brick and iron from 1865, on the bank of the Lauch at the edge of Little Venice, holding about twenty stalls of cheese, charcuterie, bread and vegetables. It closed for years and reopened in 2010 with butchers, fishmongers and growers in it. Shut on Mondays, and busiest on Thursday and Saturday mornings.
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Musée Bartholdi
The house the sculptor was born in, holding the working models for the Statue of Liberty, the Lion of Belfort and the monuments he made for towns across France, along with his Egyptian drawings from the trip that shaped the standing figure. A cast of Liberty's right ear is in the courtyard.
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Musée du jouet
Three floors of toys in a former cinema, from tin cars and doll houses to a working model railway running on the top floor, arranged by decade so the twentieth century reads through what children were given. It is the obvious wet-afternoon answer in a town whose attractions are otherwise outdoors or devotional.
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Musée Unterlinden
A Dominican convent of the thirteenth century, extended underground by Herzog and de Meuron in 2015, built around the Isenheim altarpiece: Grünewald's panels of the crucifixion and the resurrection, painted for a monastic hospital treating ergot poisoning and showing the disease on the body of Christ. Holbein, Cranach and a modern wing follow.
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Petite Venise
Market gardeners once punted their produce along the Lauch to the covered market, and the flat-bottomed boats still work this stretch of water, now carrying visitors. Houses in green, ochre and dark red come right to the bank. The bridge on the rue Turenne is where the photographs are taken, so come early.