The Sundgau

Château de Ferrette

The Château de Ferrette occupies a rocky peak rising to 612 metres, above a cliff-lined gorge, a strategic promontory occupied since early times. Frederick of Montbéliard, who inherited the lands of Upper Alsace in 1103, settled here around 1125 and took the name of the place: he founded the County of Ferrette, which for nearly two centuries was one of the most powerful lordships in Upper Alsace. In 1271, Ulrich II of Ferrette sold the castle and town to the Bishop of Basel, becoming his vassal, and the county then passed to the Habsburgs. The castle was renovated around 1446, rebuilt in 1488, enlarged in 1552 and then adapted to firearms between 1571 and 1615; in 1540, the Fugger bankers had a rampart built linking the upper castle to the lower castle. In 1632, during the Thirty Years' War, the Swedes seized it and sacked the town; only the lower part was restored, and the castle gradually fell into ruin. Given by Louis XIV to Cardinal Mazarin, the estate passed in 1777 to the Grimaldis, through the marriage of the future Honoré IV of Monaco to a Mazarin heiress, and the Prince of Monaco still bears the title of Count of Ferrette. The ruins, listed in 1930, are being consolidated with help from the town and the département.

Château du Morimont

The remains of Morimont, Burg Mörsberg in German, stand at an altitude of 522 metres in the commune of Oberlarg, one kilometre from the Swiss border, 45 kilometres from Basel and 40 from Mulhouse. First mentioned in 1183, it is recorded in 1271, when the Count of Ferrette placed it under the suzerainty of the Bishop of Basel, and then, like Ferrette and Landskron, it passed to the Habsburgs. The Basel earthquake destroyed it in 1356; the Morimont family, vassals of the Ferrettes, rebuilt it, and Pierre de Morimont, its most illustrious lord, turned it into a fortress fit for firearms. Financial difficulties forced the family to sell it in 1582 to the Counts of Ortenburg-Salamanca. Occupied by the Swedes in 1632, it was completely destroyed by the French on 2 April 1635. Louis XIV gave it in 1641 to the Vignacourt family, who kept it until the Revolution. In July 1826, Xavier Stockmar, Olivier Seuret and the Quiquerez brothers swore an oath here that remains famous in the history of the Swiss Jura. The ruins, listed as a historic monument in October 1841, are free to visit, five minutes' walk from the car park.

Château du Landskron

Landskron towers over Leymen and the Leimental, a few metres from Hofstetten-Flüh, in Switzerland. Built before 1297, it held a key position for watching over the eastern Sundgau, the bend of the Rhine and Basel, and its ownership was already disputed at that time. Having passed to the Habsburgs, it was entrusted in 1462 to the Reich von Reichenstein lords, who enlarged it and made it a fortress in 1516. When Habsburg Alsace became French in 1648, Landskron escaped the fate of the other Alsatian strongholds, which were abandoned or razed: after 1665, Vauban restructured it and installed a garrison. Overshadowed by Huningue and Neuf-Brisach, from the 1690s it served as a state prison, mainly for political prisoners or those locked up by lettre de cachet. In December 1813, at the start of the Campaign of France, Austrian and Bavarian troops dismantled it; only the keep was saved, thanks to the parish priest of Hagenthal-le-Bas, who persuaded General von Wrede to spare it. Listed as a historic monument in 1923, the castle went through a curious interlude in the 1970s, when its owners installed a colony of monkeys there. From the ruins, the panorama takes in the Jura, the Rhine plain and Basel.

Oltingue Farm Museum

Oltingue is a village in the Alsatian Jura, on the banks of the Ill, whose farm museum is a lifetime's work. For years, Abbé Étienne Bilger, a parish priest devoted to his home ground, gathered the objects that Sundgau families were throwing away or banishing to the attic: tools, utensils, furniture, costumes. An association, the Maison du Sundgau, bought and restored an old farmhouse to house them, and the abbé donated his collection to the city of Mulhouse. Some walls have been left bare to show the timber-frame and wattle-and-daub construction. The displays cover the trades, domestic life, farm work and religious life of the Sundgau in the 19th and early 20th centuries; younger visitors marvel at the non-electric waffle irons, the wooden washboard and the old looms. On the edge of the village, the Saint-Martin-des-Champs chapel, the last trace of the original village destroyed by the Armagnacs in 1445, preserves medieval frescoes and Merovingian tombs uncovered during excavations. The museum opens mainly in the afternoon from March to October, for a €2.50 ticket.

Source of the Ill at Winkel

The Ill is the backbone of Alsace: 217 kilometres long, it flows through 68 communes, including Mulhouse and Strasbourg, before joining the Grand Canal d'Alsace at Offendorf. Yet it starts out very modestly at Winkel, a village in the Alsatian Jura backing onto the Glaserberg massif, at an altitude of around 550 metres, in a landscape of meadows and beech woods. At the source, a single step takes you from one bank to the other. A waymarked path lets you extend the walk to the heights, and the Allée des Hêtres opens up a wide view over the hills. The village also has a painful history: its inhabitants were evacuated in 1939-1940 to the commune of Commensacq in the Landes, with which Winkel sealed a twinning in 1978 in memory of that exodus. In winter, the Winkel Nordic site and the snowshoe trails of the Glaserberg draw snow lovers when there is enough cover.

Altkirch

Altkirch, whose name means "old church", is the capital of the Sundgau and a sub-prefecture of the Haut-Rhin, built on a hill above the Ill and surrounded by forests and hills backing onto the foothills of the Alsatian Jura. Founded in the 12th century, the town belonged to the Counts of Ferrette, who had the Saint-Morand priory built. Until 1845, the church stood on what is now Place de la République and the castle on today's Place de l'Église; that year, most of the castle was demolished to build the new Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption church. The Musée Sundgauvien, created in 1877 from a collection of Celtic axes, moved in 1952 into the former Maison du Bailli, a 16th-century building with a spiral staircase; it brings together archaeology, mementoes of the two world wars, Sundgau furniture and costumes, and a series of portraits by the Alsatian painter Jean-Jacques Henner. CRAC Alsace, a Rhineland contemporary art centre founded in 1992, occupies the former lycée and puts on demanding exhibitions. At the Saint-Morand hospital, the Baroque chapel has a ceiling painted by Giuseppe Appiani. The streets also host works of street art.