Also situated near both Germany and Switzerland, between the Vosges and the Rhine, between Strasbourg and Mulhouse, the town of Colmar provides a view down the long lens of a thousand years of European history.

Colmar is an exceptional, multi-faceted city with its Christmas Markets, film festival, Alsace wine fair, birthplace of Auguste Bartholdi the father-creator of the Statue of Liberty, green town and centre of Humanism.

With close on 70,000 inhabitants, Colmar still has a charming « village in the countryside » feel to it. The wine capital of Alsace, Colmar symbolises the attachment to cultural values, know-how and traditions. It is one of the largest wine-producing communes with nearly 400 hectares of vineyards.

Colmar is also a town which is rich in art and history which is always up-kept and shown to its best advantage. It has an enormous pedestrianised area which enables visitors to enjoy and admire the innumerable riches of its heritage from the Middle Ages to the 20^th century. There are several remarkable monuments which symbolise this rich heritage :

• Tall half-timbered and wooden-framed houses from the 17^th and 18^th centuries in the ‘Quartier des Tanneurs’
• The ‘Köifhaus’ or ‘Ancienne Douane’ (Customs House), the oldest local public building occupying a strategic place at the heart of the medieval town
• The ‘Maison de Têtes’, a German Renaissance gem of a building constructed in 1609.
• « Petite Venise » (Little Venice), this being the name given to the course of the River Lauch through the centre of Colmar, the name coming from the particular alignment of the houses on both banks of the river
• The Church of the Dominicans – a significant piece of mendicant order architecture

For more information about Colmar