www.tourisme-colmar.com. The lively capital of Haut-Rhin, Colmar sprawls across the plain around a toy-town centre of picture-book winding streets and pastel-painted half-timbered houses. Its tourist credentials are augmented by a helpful tourist office with plentiful information about the region, its public transport and outdoor pursuits.

Across from the tourist office, the broad-ranging and hugely popular Musée Unterlinden de Colmar (www.musee-unterlinden.com) is laid out in a former Dominican convent, where a 13thC chapel houses the Issenheim Altarpiece. Intended as a single unit, it is now displayed in three sections: the first two are masterpieces painted by Mathias Grünewald at the end of the Gothic period (about 1512-16) with a glimmer of the developing Renaissance style; the third contains rather earlier sculptures (c. 1490) by Nicholas de Haguenau. The central retable depicts a tortured Crucifixion, the Christ-figure stretched on the cross with splayed upturned hands, flanked by Saint John with the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, and John the Baptist. Below there is a scene from the Entombment, while Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony appear on the hinged wings. Close by, the old Eglise des Dominicans charges a somewhat extortionate fee for its 14thC stained glass and another precious altarpiece, Martin Schon-gauer’s lovely Vierge au buisson de roses.

Stroll down rue des Têtes to see the Maison des Têtes, its Renaissance fa√笵cade decorated with numerous, carved heads. On rue des Marchands, the birthplace of 19thC sculptor Frederic Bartholdi has been turned into a small museum with sketches of his most famous oeuvre, the Statue of Liberty.

On place de la Cathédrale, the 13th-14thC Collégiale de Saint-Martin is commonly described as ‘the cathedral’. Inside there is some beautiful glass, and vaulted passages with floral keystones lead to the ambulatory chapels decorated with carvings and gilded retables.

Leave the square at the southern end, past the 16thC Maison Pfister with its painted fa√笵cade, and there are more fine houses on Grande Rue. Down by the River Lauch, quai de la Poissonerie flaunts a row of unbelievably cute fishermen’s cottages (several of which harbour fish restaurants) in the Petite Venise, a popular tourist haunt.