Colmar is a French municipality located in the European community
of Alsace, in the Grand Est region. It is the prefecture of the
Haut-Rhin and, with a little more than 70,000 inhabitants, the third
Alsatian municipality in terms of number of inhabitants after
Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Its inhabitants are called the Colmarians.
Colmar is mentioned for the first time in the ninth century. A
free city of the Holy Empire, it is a member of the Decapolis. It
experienced rapid development at the end of the Middle Ages and
during the Renaissance. Endowed with a belt of ramparts, it
nevertheless suffers from the troubles linked to the Reform, the
Peasants' War and then the Thirty Years' War, following which it is
annexed by France. Colmar was ceded to the German Empire in 1871 and
then reintegrated into France following the armistice of 1918.
Although not the capital of the region, Colmar is home to a court of
appeal. This particularity (which it shares in particular with
Aix-en-Provence, Douai or Riom in regions whose capital is also not
the seat of a Court of Appeal) is due to the elevation of the city
to the rank of judicial capital by the former Sovereign Council of
Alsace in 1698.
The city has a rich architectural heritage,
including an old collegiate church, several convents, a remarkable
theater, canals (Little Venice) and houses from the Middle Ages. Its
location, in the center of the Alsatian vineyard and close to the
Vosges Piedmont, and its particular climate conducive to the
cultivation of the vine, earn it the nickname of "capital of the
wines of Alsace". It is also a city of culture, home of the
Unterlinden Museum housing the Issenheim altarpiece. Colmar is also
the birthplace of the creator of the Statue of Liberty in New York,
Auguste Bartholdi and Jean-Jacques Waltz, better known as Hansi.
House of the Heads of Colmar
The building is located at 19,
rue des Têtes in Colmar.
The Maison des Têtes is a historical
monument located in Colmar, in the French department of Haut-Rhin.
Historical
This house, built in 16091 on behalf of the
merchant Anton Burger, stettmeister of Colmar from 1626 to 1628, is
one of the best known in Colmar. The house, which has been
classified as a historical monument since December 6, 1898.
Anton Burger (Antoine Burger)
Anton was born in 1579. He had his
father's house demolished in 1609, to rebuild on the original site
the one that from 1974 would forever bear the name of the “House of
the Heads”.
He had his coat of arms (castle or Burg) placed
twice on the facade, on the scrolled gable and above the portal, of
this house with the unusual decoration composed of a profusion of
figurines and above all of 105 grotesque masks. from which it takes
its name. Part of the second representation includes the arms of his
wife, Anne Ortlieb from Riquewihr and whose father Conrad Ortlieb
was immortalized by a figurine on a house in Riquewihr.
Anton
Burger belonged since 1602 to the corporation of merchants and took
an active part in the life of the city as a municipal councilor from
1612 to become Stattmeister in 1626. The Catholic reform or
Counter-Reformation made him flee and he settled in Basel in 1698
where he remained until the end of his days.
Different owners
In 1698, Anton's heirs ceded the Maison des Têtes to Baudoin De
Launay against 1,500 Thalers. And the house goes from owner to
owner. From one named Guillier, treasurer of the extraordinary wars
of Sélestat, to De Prudhomme, captain of the Noailles infantry
regiment before being acquired by the Wine Exchange.
A
testament to this past as a wine exchange, the Maison des Têtes has
a bronze cooper on its scalloped gable (1902), a sculpture of one of
Colmar's most famous citizens, Auguste Bartholdi. It became a
Restaurant and a meeting place in 1898. Today almost 100 years after
the opening of the restaurant La Maison des Têtes, Carmen and Marc
Rohfritsch have restored two-thirds of the buildings, which have
become dilapidated and remained unoccupied for around forty years.
years, in order to add a hotel.
In 2015, Marilyn and Éric
Girardin opened a gourmet restaurant which received one star in the
prestigious Michelin Guide in February 2017.
Map of Western Europe showing the important cities located within 500
kilometers of Colmar.
The cities located less than 500 km from
Colmar.
The municipality belongs to the Rhenish Europe, which has
nearly one hundred million people and extends from the Netherlands to
Switzerland via Belgium, Luxembourg, Lorraine, Alsace and western
Germany.
Colmar is located halfway between Strasbourg, to the
north (64 km) and Basel, to the south (60 km). Freiburg im Breisgau is
38 km to the east and Mulhouse is 37 km (to the south) are the nearest
cities. Further away, as the crow flies, we find Zurich at 119 km,
Luxembourg at 193 km, Geneva at 229 km, Munich at 314 km, Innsbruck at
317 km, Lyon at 322 km, Milan at 323 km, Brussels at 378 km and Paris at
380 km.
The neighboring municipalities are Illhaeusern, Grussenheim, Jebsheim, Sundhoffen, Horbourg-Wihr, Sainte-Croix-en-Plaine, Wettolsheim, Wintzenheim, Ingersheim, Ammerschwihr, Sigolsheim, Bennwihr, Houssen, Ostheim, Guémar, Herrlisheim-près-Colmar, Porte du Ried, Kaysersberg Vineyard, Riedwihr and Holtzwihr.
The territory of the municipality is located within the plain of
Alsace. This Rhenish collapse ditch, separating the Vosges massif to the
west from that of the Black Forest to the east, was born 65 Ma ago on
the occasion of the surrection of the Alps. Cracks oriented north-south
then formed; the middle part collapsed and was invaded by the sea in the
upper Eocene (around -35 Ma) and in the lower Oligocene (Rupelian,
around -30 Ma). First filled in by marine deposits that covered the
Hercynian basement, the plain welcomed the course of the Rhine which
deposited its fluvial alluvium there, only a million years ago. In the
western edge of the ditch, where Colmar is located today, the thickness
of the sedimentary deposits increases with Eocene and Oligocene deposits
resulting from the erosion of the Vosges.
Colmar is located to
the north of the potassium basin and the sub-Vosges coal basin but also
to the south of the Villé valley coal basin.
The area of the
municipality is 6,657 hectares; its altitude varies between 175 and 214
meters.
The territory of the municipality is, at the foot of the
Vosges mountains, the third largest in Alsace after Haguenau (18,259
hectares) and Strasbourg (7,826 hectares), and the first in its
department ahead of Orbey (4,602 hectares), Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines
(4,523 hectares), Rouffach (4,005 hectares), Ensisheim (3,659 hectares).
Hydrogeology and climatology: Information system for the management
of the Rhenish Aquifer [archive], by the BRGM :
Communal territory:
Land use (Corinne Land Cover); Watercourses (BD Carthage),
Geology:
Geological map; Geological and technical sections,
Hydrogeology:
Groundwater bodies; Lisa comics; Piezometric maps.
Watercourses crossing the town :
Coming from the south, the Lauch
and its tributaries (the Brennbaechlein, the Muhlbach, the Sinnbach, the
Gerberbach and the Thur) irrigate many districts of Colmar, including
that of Little Venice.
The Logelbach canal, partly covered, crosses
the city from west to east and the Ill, to the east, which collects all
the aforementioned waterways, runs along it to the north.
The
Channeled Lauch.
The Colmar canal.
Streams :
Blind Creek,
Orchbach creek,
Logelbach stream,
Brunnenwasser Creek,
Langgraben Creek,
The Riedbrunnen stream.
In 2010, the climate of the municipality is of the degraded oceanic
climate type of the Central and Northern plains, according to a study by
the National Center for Scientific Research based on a series of data
covering the period 1971-2000. In 2020, Météo-France publishes a
typology of the climates of metropolitan France in which the
municipality is exposed to a semi-continental climate and is in a
transition zone between the climatic regions "Vosges" and "Alsace".
For the period 1971-2000, the average annual temperature is 10.4 °
C, with an annual thermal amplitude of 17.8 ° C. The average annual
cumulative rainfall is 592 mm, with 8.2 days of precipitation in January
and 8.8 days in July. For the period 1991-2020, the annual average
temperature observed on the meteorological station installed in the
municipality is 11.3 ° C and the average annual cumulative rainfall is
558.0 mm. The maximum temperature recorded on this station is 39.6 ° C,
reached on August 13, 2003; the minimum temperature is -22.5 °C, reached
on February 22, 1986.
The climate parameters of the municipality
have been estimated for the middle of the century (2041-2070) according
to different greenhouse gas emission scenarios based on the new
DRIAS-2020 reference climate projections. They can be consulted on a
dedicated website published by Météo-France in November 2022.
Colmar is an urban municipality, because it is part of the dense or
intermediate density municipalities, within the meaning of the Insee's
communal density grid. It belongs to the urban unit of Colmar, an
intra-departmental agglomeration grouping 7 municipalities and 95,102
inhabitants in 2017, of which it is the city-center.
Moreover,
the town is part of the attraction area of Colmar, of which it is the
town-center. This area, which includes 95 municipalities, is categorized
into areas of 50,000 to less than 200,000 inhabitants.
The land use of the municipality, as it appears from the European database of biophysical land use Corine Land Cover (CLC), is marked by the importance of agricultural territories (49.4% in 2018), a proportion substantially equivalent to that of 1990 (50.4%). The detailed distribution in 2018 is as follows: arable land (39.1%), urbanized areas (19.3%), forests (18.8%), industrial or commercial areas and communication networks (12.1%), permanent crops (6.1%), heterogeneous agricultural areas (4.2%), artificial green spaces, non-agricultural (0.5%). The evolution of the land use of the municipality and its infrastructures can be observed on the various cartographic representations of the territory: the Cassini map (eighteenth century), the staff map (1820-1866) and the maps or aerial photos of the IGN for the current period (1950 to today).
The city is composed of nine districts. The railway serves as a separation between the western and eastern part of Colmar. The city center is the tourist district of Colmar. It is surrounded by the neighborhoods of Sainte-Marie, Europe / Schweitzer to the southwest, west of Florimont / Bel Air then northwest of Saint-Joseph / Mittelharth. On the other side of the railway, it is first Saint-Léon to the north, Saint-Antoine / Ladhof to the east and north-east, then Market Gardeners to the south-east and South District to the south.
The city council created in 1922, under the efforts of its future
mayor Édouard Richard, the municipal office of cheap housing, of which
he will be president from 1935 to 1964, and which aims to create social
housing and garden cities. Between 1925 and 1932, more than 700 housing
units were delivered, including the city of the Vosges, the city of La
Fecht or the garden city of Wintzenheim. This organization will be
transformed in 1950 into a social housing company.
Under the
leadership of the future mayor Joseph Rey, between 1945 and 1963, the
city built 5,000 new housing units in communal housing estates,
especially in the western neighborhoods. All this currently constitutes
a third of the municipality's real estate assets. The geographical
division of Colmar then encourages the city council to restore the
historic heart of the city and transform it into a protected sector on
35 ha (approved in 2002). Likewise, urban renewal plans, mainly in the
western districts, aim to replace buildings that have become too
dilapidated.
In 2009, the total number of dwellings in the
municipality was 33,573, compared to 30,338 in 1999.
Of these,
90.0% were primary residences, 1.4% were secondary residences and 8.7%
were vacant. Of these, 17.4% were single-family houses and 82.1% were
apartments.
The proportion of main residences owned by their
occupants was 36.1%, an increase compared to 1999 (32.4%). The share of
empty rented housing units (social housing) was 30.7% compared to 31.1%
in 1999.
Many buildings have been built since 1995 such as the police station,
the fire station, the Colmar Stadium sports complex, the Aqualia
swimming pool as well as car parks (Rapp square, Lacarre square,
Saint-Josse Street, Green Mountain square: 711 underground spaces and
urban park surface).
Other sites have been redeveloped, such as
the Grillen music hall, the covered market or the former hospital in
Edmond Gerrer media-culture center on 7,888 m2 (with redevelopment of
the Place du 2-Février).
Other construction projects are being
studied: a university gymnasium, a psychiatric asylum, an extension of
the court after the closure of the Colmar detention center in June 2021
or a southern ring road.
Numerous parks and public gardens are spread throughout the city,
representing a total of 108 ha, to which 33 ha of allotment gardens are
added. The city has been rewarded with four flowers and the Grand
National Prize for flowering since 1984 in the list of winners of the
competition of cities and villages in bloom.
The Champ-de-Mars
park is located between Rapp Square to the north and the Haut-Rhin
Prefecture to the south. It has extensive green areas. In the center,
there is a fountain surmounted by the statue of Admiral Bruat built in
1864 and built by Bartholdi. In its south-western part is installed a
carousel with its closed gallery, a unique model in Europe by its scale.
The layout of this park recalls the cross of the Legion of honor.
The water tower park is located at the corner of Avenue Joffre and
Avenue Poincaré. It is also called Court of Appeal Park. Its area is
13,990 m2. It hosts, as its name suggests, the old water tower of the
city erected in 1884 and classified as a historical monument. A statue
representing Auguste Bartholdi is erected at the south-eastern entrance
to the park. The western part is a magnificent rose garden extending
over 450 m2 and composed of 990 plants divided into 38 varieties.
Among the many other parks and gardens of the city, we can highlight
the Saint François-Xavier park (9,980 m2), the Méquillet park (5,753
m2), the Hirn square (French garden) or the Montagne-Verte square (3,273
m2), renamed "Montagne-Verte - Parc Georges Pompidou" since 2020,
following the development of an underground car park and the subsequent
extension of the surface square (1.7 ha), on the site of the former car
park.
To the east of the city is the Neuland / Fronholz massif
which spreads over 614 ha and has a health course and a nature house, an
association whose theme is environmental education and sustainable
development. The Niederwald/Rothleible massif covers 778 ha.
Two bypasses make it possible to relieve congestion in the city, in
particular on the Mulhouse - Strasbourg axis which crossed the city by
the Avenue d'Alsace.
The one on the A35 motorway, which connects
Strasbourg (40 minutes) to the north, Mulhouse (30 minutes) and Basel
(40 minutes) to the south, also called the "eastern bypass" was
inaugurated in 1995. It has, at the height of the city, four
interchanges (No. 26 to no. 23) in the south-north direction (Colmar
Center, Colmar Semm, Ladhof and Rozenkranz) and two interchanges (No. 23
and no. 25) in the north-south direction (Rosenkranz and Colmar south).
That of the RD 83, which connects, in Alsace, the west of Mulhouse
(and more generally the traffic coming from Belfort) to Strasbourg,
makes it possible to bypass Colmar by the west and the north, thus
avoiding all the transit of heavy goods vehicles. It is a 2×2-lane urban
boulevard between the village of Ingersheim to the west and the Colmar
district of Ladhof to the north.
Since the implementation of the
new traffic plan for the city center in the fall of 2002, two ring
roads, close to the old ramparts, limit transit through the hypercenter.
Each circulates in the opposite direction.
The project of a
south-eastern bypass connecting the RD 83 to the A 35, is still under
study
The city has about 4,000 parking spaces on free or disc car parks,
including sixty for people with reduced mobility (PRM) (excluding free
parking on the roadway or straddling sidewalks). The city also has six
paid parking lots: the underground parking lot at Rapp Square (900
places), the underground and silo parking lot at Lacarre Square (685
places), the underground parking lot at Green Mountain (690 places), the
open parking lot at Saint-Josse Square (487 places), the underground
parking lot at Town Hall Square (367 places) and the "Gare/Bleylé" silo
parking lot (200 places), located at next to the Colmar train station.
Railway tracks
The Colmar train station is the main station of
the agglomeration, and also serves as a bus station. Located in the
middle of the Strasbourg - Mulhouse - Basel railway axis (TER 200), it
is served by regional trains every 30 minutes during peak hours. The
town has two other railway stops assigned to TER traffic: the stations
of Colmar-Saint-Joseph and Colmar-Mésanges. The old Colmar-Sud train
station is now closed. The Colmar - Munster - Metzeral line provides
passenger services to the Munster Valley.
Since June 10, 2007,
the city has been connected to high-speed rail thanks to the
commissioning of the first section of the Eastern European high-speed
rail. Two daily round trips to Paris-East are scheduled. The second
phase of this high-speed line, opened in July 2016, has increased the
best travel time between Colmar and Paris to 2 hours 30 minutes compared
to more than 4 hours 30 minutes previously. In addition, Colmar is 3
hours 15 minutes from Lyon and 5 hours from Marseille since the
commissioning of the eastern branch of the new high-speed Rhine-Rhone
line between Dijon and Mulhouse on December 11, 2011.
A rail link
between Colmar and Fribourg could be restored by 2026-2027.
Colmar also has a freight station.
The marina of Colmar allows the docking of 60 boats on eight
pontoons, served by water and electricity. It has a captain's office
with sanitary facilities, showers, lingerie, shop with fittings and
fenced parking for boats and cars.
Since 2006, it has had the
European Blue Flag, which rewards and values French municipalities and
marinas that meet criteria of excellence for the overall management of
their environment.
The port also collects many trophies and
awards in terms of flowering.
The Rhine port Colmar / Volgelsheim
with 500,000 tons of rail freight per year is the "Water-Iron-Road"
logistics platform in Central Alsace.
The Colmar-Houssen airport was founded in 1953, it is used mainly for
business and sports aviation 6. Since 1960, it also allows business
aviation. Used for emergency medical transport, it is therefore open
24/24. The management of the Colmar airport platform, once threatened
with closure, has been entrusted since 2007 to the company Liebherr.
Two international airports are located less than 45 minutes away,
Strasbourg-Entzheim Airport and Basel-Mulhouse-Fribourg airport, both
with direct access by the A35 motorway.
The first public transport network was inaugurated in February 1879,
when the city launched a first omnibus line between the old station and
the Place du Saumon. A second line was opened in April 1893. The network
is operated successively by three private companies.
In 1902,
Colmar put into operation its first tramway line. In 1935, it had three,
including a Colmar-Wintzenheim suburban line. In the 1960s, following
the rise in the price of oil and the increasingly common use of the
automobile, the operation of the tramway was stopped, as was also the
case in Mulhouse and Strasbourg.
The TRACE bus network (Transport
of Colmar and Surroundings), created in 1990, originally served three
municipalities: Colmar, Horbourg-Wihr and Wintzenheim. Currently, the
network has twenty-two for about 111,655 inhabitants.
In 2015, La
TRACE operates sixteen lines from Monday to Saturday (nine urban lines
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9) and seven intercity lines (lines 20, 21,
22, 23, 24, 25 and 26). There are also three lines on Sundays and public
holidays (lines A, B and C), an event line (line E) as well as a minibus
on request for people with reduced mobility.
In 2007, 6,319,054
passengers used public transport in Colmar
It is one of the first
networks in France to have put into service buses powered by natural gas
(NGV) from 1998. The Trace network is currently one of the cleanest
urban transport networks in France with more than 90% of the buses (37
out of a total of 41 operated) running with natural gas engines.
Since April 27, 2019, small electric buses have been running in the city
center. Their use is free of charge.
Regarding the layout of bus
stops, 73 are equipped with a passenger information system allowing them
to know the arrival time of the next bus in real time and 54% allow
accessibility to people with reduced mobility.
About fifteen departmental bus lines have their origin and
destination in Colmar. The connecting point for all intercity lines is
located at Colmar train station. The bus lines running in Colmar are
line 106 (Colmar - Wine Route - Ribeauvillé), line 109 (Colmar -
Ribeauvillé - Saint-Hippolyte), line 145 (Colmar - Orbey - Le Bonhomme),
line 157 (Colmar - Trois-Épis - Labaroche), line 208 (Colmar - Husseren
- Obermorschwihr), line 248 (Colmar - Munster - Soultzeren) , line 301
(Colmar-Neuf-Brisach -Balgau), line 303 (Colmar-Neuf-Brisach -Biesheim),
line 316 (Colmar -Neuf-Brisach - Baltzenheim), line 318 (Colmar
-Neuf-Brisach -Ohnenheim), line 326 (Colmar -Dessenheim - Weckolsheim),
line 346 (Colmar - Marckolsheim - Artzenheim), line 437 (Colmar -
Ensisheim - Mulhouse), line 439 (Colmar - Ensisheim - Fessenheim) and
line 440 (Colmar - Ensisheim - Guebwiller).
Line 1076 provides
access to Germany and the cities of Breisach and Freiburg im Breisgau.
Since December 2009, this link has been reinforced by the increase in
frequencies and the extension to Breisach of the departmental line 301
(Colmar -Neuf-Brisach - Balgau) which allows a better interconnection
with the Breisach station and the German rail network of Deutsche Bahn.