Colmar: What Survives the Crowds

The most photographed town in Alsace is also, in places, genuinely worth seeing — if you know what to skip.

What the pictures don't tell you

The canal quarter known as La Petite Venise delivers almost exactly what its images promise, and that is precisely the problem. On any morning between May and October, the narrow quays along the Lauch are so thick with people holding phones that experiencing the place means waiting for strangers to move. The half-timbered façades are real and very old; the crowds are not a distortion of the place but now a structural part of it.

What survives the worst of this is the Dominican church, which holds a late-fifteenth-century altarpiece by Martin Schongauer — the Virgin of the Rose Bower — that is worth a long detour even before you consider the building around it. It is quiet in a way the canal never is. The Unterlinden Museum, housed in a former Dominican convent, contains Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, one of the most disturbing and technically extraordinary paintings in Europe. That alone justifies the town.

The covered market, the rue des Marchands, and the older streets north of the main tourist axis feel like a functioning Alsatian city rather than a film set. The city is compact enough that a morning on foot — arriving early, moving away from the canal by nine — reveals layers the afternoon coach-party never reaches. Colmar's problem is not that it has been ruined but that its most photogenic core has been colonised so completely that visitors mistake that core for the whole.

Go for Grünewald. Stay longer than the pictures required.