Strasbourg Is a Hub, Not a Stopover

Most visitors give Strasbourg two or three nights and then move on. That is a reasonable way to see a city and a wasteful way to use one. Look at the map properly and the case reverses. Strasbourg sits on the flat of the Rhine plain, the Vosges rising to the west and the Black Forest to the east, with a German town at the end of one of its own tram lines. Within about twenty minutes you can be in Germany; within roughly an hour and a half, in Switzerland. This is less a destination with an itinerary attached than a hub with other countries hanging off it.

The corollary is that a longer Alsace trip is not really about Strasbourg at all. It is about deciding how many bases you want, whether you need a car, and which of the two mountain ranges you are prepared to give a proper day to. Get those three decisions right and a week here is unusually rich. Get them wrong and you spend a lot of it waiting at village bus stops.

Two railways, two countries, one plain

Start with this. The Rhine plain carries two north–south railways, one on each bank, belonging to two different national networks, and they are not interchangeable.

The French one is Strasbourg's own: south through Sélestat and Colmar to Mulhouse and on to Basel; north-west out of the plain, climbing through Saverne towards Nancy, Metz and Luxembourg. The German one runs down the far bank — Rastatt, Baden-Baden, Offenburg, Freiburg — and does not serve Strasbourg at all. You join it by crossing the river eastwards to Offenburg or Appenweier, which is why Offenburg keeps recurring below: it is the junction for the whole of Baden, with Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe up the line, Freiburg down it, and the Schwarzwaldbahn climbing inland through Triberg into the Black Forest.

Everything on the French side hangs off the Gare de Strasbourg, the 1880s sandstone station wrapped since 2007 in a glass shell that looks like a dropped contact lens and works rather well.

And then there is the tram. Line D runs from the city centre across the Rhine to Kehl in Germany, roughly fifteen to twenty minutes from the middle of town on an ordinary tram ticket. Kehl is not really a destination: a tidy market town with a pedestrianised centre and gardens along the water. Plenty of people ride out to shop, and the tram carries shopping bags in both directions, but cross-border price differences move with tax rates and inflation, so we would not plan a day around them. The crossing itself is the thing, and it is better done on foot or by bike over the Passerelle des Deux Rives, the double-arc footbridge stitching the Jardin des Deux Rives together across the water. Given the choice, we would send a first-time visitor over that bridge before sending them into any museum.

The train spokes that actually work

Colmar, about thirty minutes south, is the one to take if you take only one. Go for the Musée Unterlinden and Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece — a genuinely upsetting object that repays a slow hour rather than a quick lap — then the canal quarter known as La Petite Venise and, if you have the interest, the Musée Bartholdi in the house where the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty was born. Colmar is also the road-and-bus head for the southern wine villages, which matters later.

Sélestat, about twenty minutes out, is the one we would add. Its humanist library is built around the working collection of the Renaissance scholar Beatus Rhenanus: not a treasury of showpieces but a sixteenth-century reader's own shelves, kept together. Sélestat is also the usual railhead for Haut-Koenigsbourg, the mountain castle above Orschwiller rebuilt on a grand scale for Kaiser Wilhelm II before the First World War. A seasonal shuttle bus generally links station and castle; confirm the current timetable before you plan a day around it, because outside the main season it thins out or disappears.

Mulhouse, roughly fifty minutes to an hour away, is not a beautiful town and we would give it a day regardless, for two very large industrial museums: the Cité de l'Automobile, built on the Schlumpf brothers' privately assembled collection of Bugattis, and the Cité du Train. Each will take half a day if you care at all. Nearby at Ungersheim, the Écomusée d'Alsace reassembles vernacular Alsatian buildings on an open-air site, and works better with children than either museum.

Saverne, roughly half an hour north-west on the faster services and a little more on the stopping ones, gives you the pink sandstone Château des Rohan, the ruined Château du Haut-Barr on the ridge above, and the Canal de la Marne au Rhin. Follow the canal west and you reach the inclined plane at Saint-Louis-Arzviller near Lutzelbourg, a boat lift that raises barges bodily up the hillside. Treat its status as an open question rather than a seasonal detail: the lift has been out of action for extended technical works in the past, so check with the operator that it is running before you build a day around it.

Further out, Metz takes roughly an hour and a half on most departures. These are classic-line services by way of Sarrebourg, whatever the map of the high-speed network to Paris suggests, though a handful of through trains do the leg more quickly. Metz pairs the Centre Pompidou-Metz with the Chagall glass in the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne. Nancy, roughly an hour and a half, has UNESCO-listed Place Stanislas and, to our mind more interesting, the Musée de l'École de Nancy and the art nouveau villas scattered around the city. Basel, about an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half to Basel SBB, is our pick of the lot for anyone who likes art: the Kunstmuseum in town, the Fondation Beyeler out at Riehen on a tram, and the Vitra Design Museum at Weil am Rhein, which involves crossing back into Germany on a Basel tram, a thoroughly Rhineland absurdity. Budget for Swiss prices, which are a different order from Alsatian ones.

Across the Rhine, and the ticketing trap

Germany is the half of this trip most people skip, and it is the half that makes a week feel varied. It is also where the planning asymmetries bite.

Karlsruhe is the easier of the two northern targets. Through TGV and ICE services on the Paris–Stuttgart axis call there, so it is usually a single train of roughly three quarters of an hour, with no connection to miss. It has the ZKM media-art centre and a fan-shaped baroque city plan you can read from the palace tower.

Baden-Baden normally means a change at Offenburg or Appenweier, and the two legs alone consume most of an hour before any connection wait; allow about an hour to an hour and a half door to door. A small number of through trains call there, so check the timetable rather than assuming either way. Once you arrive there is a second catch: the station is out at Oos, a few kilometres from the spa quarter, so add the bus at each end. The historic bathing culture survives in the Friedrichsbad and the larger Caracalla Therme, and the Museum Frieder Burda sits in a Richard Meier box beside the parkland of the Lichtentaler Allee.

Freiburg im Breisgau is the gateway to the southern Black Forest, with the Gothic Münster and its openwork spire and a cable car up the Schauinsland. On paper it is an hour and a quarter with the change at Offenburg; in practice, once the connection wait is counted, allow an hour and a half to two hours.

For families, the theme park at Rust is Europa-Park, reached via Ringsheim station and a shuttle bus. It is a full day rather than an afternoon, and it does not open year-round: there is a closed stretch between the end of the winter season and the spring reopening, so check the current calendar before building a trip around it.

The trap is ticketing. French and German rail are separate commercial systems, and the SNCF app will not always sell you a sensible German regional journey, nor DB a French one. Buy each side from its own operator. If you are spending several days in Baden, look at the Deutschlandticket, Germany's flat-rate monthly pass for regional transport, with two caveats that matter more than the price. It covers German regional trains, trams and buses only, never the French side. And it is sold as a rolling monthly subscription that has to be cancelled by a deadline, not as a tourist day pass. Terms change; check the current ones before you buy.

The wine route, and why it is the hard part

The Alsace wine route is the reason many people come, and it is the one element that resists public transport.

Some villages sit on the railway or a short bus hop from it: Obernai, Barr, Dambach-la-Ville and Molsheim among them, and Turckheim, which has its own halt on the branch line climbing from Colmar towards the Munster valley — a few minutes' ride, which puts it within reach without a car. Others are not so lucky. Riquewihr, Ribeauvillé, Eguisheim, Kaysersberg and Hunawihr are strung along a lane at the foot of the hills and served by buses out of Colmar that run to school-term rhythms and thin out badly on Sundays.

Three honest options. Hire a car for two or three days only, from Strasbourg or Colmar, and accept that village parking is on the edges and paid. Take a guided minibus wine tour, which is the pragmatic answer for anyone who intends to taste seriously: the French drink-drive limit is 0.5 grams of alcohol per litre of blood, and lower again — around 0.2 — for drivers in their first years of licence, which is worth checking against the current rules and which applies to the hire car just as much as to any other plan. Or ride: the vineyard is laced with signposted cycle routes, gradients are gentle at the foot of the slope, and hire is easy in both cities.

A separate and lovely half-day ride leaves Strasbourg itself along the towpath of the Canal de la Bruche towards Molsheim. The canal runs roughly twenty kilometres end to end, from the Ill at Montagne Verte up to Soultz-les-Bains, and Molsheim sits short of the head, so call it under twenty kilometres each way: flat throughout, made-up path through the city, gravel beyond. Take the train back.

Whichever you choose, do fewer villages. Two in a day, with a long lunch of tarte flambée or baeckeoffe and a booked visit at a grower, beats five walked through with a camera. Book the grower ahead. Many cellars are small family operations, and while some keep a tasting room open through the summer, an appointment is worth more rather than less in the busy months; a few days' notice by phone or email is usually enough out of season, and longer in it. Riquewihr and Eguisheim are the postcard sets, and are crowded from late morning. Bergheim is quieter, and so are Mittelbergheim and Andlau, both a short hop from Barr — handsome and reachable without a car, a combination this route does not offer often.

The Vosges, and the history above them

West of the vineyard the land goes up fast. Mont Sainte-Odile, the clifftop convent above Ottrott, has drawn pilgrims since the early Middle Ages — Odile is the patron saint of Alsace — and is a straightforward objective for a morning with a car. Higher and further south, the Route des Crêtes runs the ridgeline past the Grand Ballon, Le Hohneck and Lac Blanc; it was built for military supply in the First World War, and sections close in winter snow.

Two places demand a different register. Natzweiler-Struthof stands above Natzwiller, in the Rothau valley; Rothau, down in the valley, is the station to aim for and was the point at which deportees arrived. The memorial describes it as the only concentration camp the Nazis built on what is now French territory — the ground had been annexed to the Reich in 1940 — and the site is preserved alongside the European centre for deported resistance members. It is a hard visit, opening is restricted in winter and the current times vary, so confirm before travelling. It should not be tacked onto a wine day.

The Mémorial d'Alsace-Moselle is not at Struthof but at Schirmeck, a separate town a few kilometres away down the valley, so allow for the drive between the two. It sets out the sequence that explains almost everything else you will see: four changes of nationality between 1870 and 1945 — French to German at the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871, back to France after the First World War, German again with the annexation of 1940, and French once more in 1945. That is what gives the villages their meaning. Give the pair a full day, and go by car.

The far north is a separate country again. Wissembourg, about an hour by train, is a border town of half-timbered gables; nearby, the Maginot Line works near Hunspach and Lembach open seasonally and are startling to walk through, though dates and guided-tour times vary, so confirm them before setting out. The glassmaking valley around Wingen-sur-Moder holds the Musée Lalique.

Three shapes for a longer trip

Five nights, one base. Stay in Strasbourg throughout. Two days in the city, then Colmar, then a German day (Karlsruhe or Freiburg), then a wine day by tour or hire car. Simple, no repacking, and no day exceeds about ninety minutes of travel each way.

Eight nights, two bases. Four in Strasbourg, four in Colmar. The second base halves the daily transit to the southern vineyard and to Mulhouse, and puts Basel within easy reach. Move between the two by train in about half an hour with luggage.

Ten to twelve nights, three bases and an open jaw. Fly into Frankfurt, or take the high-speed train from Paris Gare de l'Est, roughly an hour and three-quarters to two hours. Strasbourg for four nights; then pick up a car for four nights based in a wine village or in the Vosges foothills, covering the ridge road, Struthof and the villages; drop the car in Mulhouse or Colmar and finish with three nights in Basel, flying out of the EuroAirport. Because the region runs north to south along a single corridor, a straight-line itinerary spares you the backtracking a loop would cost.

What goes wrong

Closing days catch us out here more than anything else does. Strasbourg's municipal museums generally shut on Tuesdays, and German museums often shut on Mondays, which looks like a tidy rule — Germany on Tuesday, France on Monday — and is not one. ZKM in Karlsruhe, to take the obvious case, is usually closed on Mondays and Tuesdays both. Build the week around the specific institutions you want and check each one; the pattern is a starting point, never a plan.

Village restaurants across Alsace often close on Sunday evening and Monday, and a good many take annual holidays in August. Last trains from small Alsace stations are earlier than you expect, and a village dinner can leave you stranded, so confirm the return before you sit down.

In late November and December, Strasbourg hotel rates rise steeply and weekend trains south are packed; the day trips work far better midweek and early in the morning. And allow more time than the timetable suggests for anything involving a change at Offenburg or Appenweier — connections there are tight, and missing one on a regional line can cost an hour.