A French city built in German.
The cathedral, the canals, and the villages on the wine road south.
Strasbourg is a French city with German bones, and the pleasure of the place is that neither half ever won. Timber houses lean over canals, the menus argue with themselves, and above all of it stands a cathedral in pink sandstone that was for centuries the tallest building on earth. South of the city a road runs through walled villages that look invented, and choosing between the two is the only difficult part of the day.
- Duration
- A long day. The drive north west is the price, and the city or the villages is the choice it forces.
- Pickup
- Early from your Zurich hotel, up through Basel and over into France.
- Group size
- Your party alone, which matters on the wine road, where the good cellars are small rooms.
- Season
- Vines turn gold in October and the villages are at their best then. December is the Christmas market season and a different day entirely.
Alsace changed hands so often that the region learned to keep both sets of habits. You get French bread and German wine glasses, a cathedral in the Gothic of the Rhineland with a French choir school attached, and street names in two languages on the same corner. Nothing about it is a compromise. It reads instead like a place that decided to keep everything.
Written about this day
France is the western direction among the day trips from Zurich. The road there passes Basel, which is a day of its own if art is what you are after.