Situated in the centre of Alsace and famous for its magnificent Christmas market, Colmar is an essential stopover when visiting the Alsatian region. Very popular with tourists, summer and winter, the city knows how to renew itself all year round.
Situated in the centre of Alsace and famous for its magnificent Christmas market, Colmar is an essential stopover when visiting the Alsatian region. Very popular with tourists, summer and winter, the city knows how to renew itself all year round.
Colmar is THE Alsatian city par excellence. Its picturesque architecture, its traditional restaurants, its museum and its vineyards make it a city not to be missed in the Great East. Stroll through a maze of cobbled streets, admire its half-timbered houses painted in pastel shades of all colours or discover its flowered bridges by taking the canals on board gondolas. With its typical charm of the region, you will undoubtedly be seduced.
It is however in a less traditional way that we propose you to discover the alleys of Colmar. Raise your head and let yourself be carried away by a journey through time and the history of the city through the medieval shopkeepers' signs.
On the walls of the half-timbered houses, forged and painted in colour, numerous decorated plaques bear witness to the past of the city's different groups of merchants: the guilds. The signs of Colmar will seduce you in particular by their finesse and the humour that sometimes emerges from them.
Originally, in order to adapt to a predominantly illiterate population, the signs made it possible, with the help of suggestive drawings, to know what type of business one was in front of. The motif had to be as explicit as possible so that, at a glance, the trade represented was suggested: a mug of beer and a bed for an inn or a pair of shoes for the cobbler, for example.
The inhabitants could then find their way around thanks to these signs which, still today in several towns in France, give names to streets. Who doesn't know a "rue des boulangers" or a "rue des tanneurs" near his home?
You will now know that these are all vestiges of the time of the commercial signs and, in Colmar, this gives you the opportunity to discover in a playful way the history of the city, its shops and craftsmen of yesteryear.
To prepare your visit to Colmar, it's here.
Marie de Comme des Français
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