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Few French towns wear their identity as legibly as Colmar. The capital of the Haut-Rhin department in the Grand Est region sits at the edge of the Alsatian plain, with the Vosges mountains rising to the west and the Rhine marking the German border to the east. That geography has shaped everything: the half-timbered houses painted in ochre, rose, and sage green, the canal-threaded quarter known as La Petite Venise, the wine culture rooted in centuries of Alsatian viticulture, and a civic character that has passed between French and German rule more than once without losing its own particular accent.

The old town is compact enough to cover on foot, and most visitors find themselves drawn first to the Grand Rue and the streets fanning out from the Collegiate Church of Saint-Martin, whose Gothic stonework has presided over the market square since the thirteenth century. La Petite Venise, the neighbourhood where tanners and market gardeners once lived along the Lauch river, rewards an unhurried afternoon. The coloured reflections in the water and the flower-laden balconies above the bridges are among the most photographed scenes in Alsace, and rightly so, though the area is equally worth exploring in the quieter morning hours before the day-trippers arrive from Strasbourg.