Colmar in 4 days

The panels are shown apart, so you walk round them: the Crucifixion of around 1515, the blazing Resurrection, and Nicolas of Haguenau's gilded carvings.

A bare 13th-century church with 14th-century stained glass, home since 1973 to Martin Schongauer's Madonna of the Rose Bower, painted in 1473.

Colmar's great Gothic church, built from 1235 to 1365 in yellow sandstone, with a portal signed by Maître Humbret and an unusual bulb-topped tower.

The birthplace of Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, with his working models, studies of the hand and face, and the family apartment.

Tall, narrow half-timbered houses whose open top floors once dried hides, saved from demolition by a 1970s restoration that set an example across France.

Market gardeners once delivered their vegetables by boat; today electric boats leave the Saint-Pierre bridge for short commented trips through the old town.

Six markets within ten minutes' walk of each other, including a children's market in Little Venice with chalets reflected in the Lauch at dusk.

The Lauch runs between low, colourful houses in the old quarter of fishermen and market gardeners; the name is a 20th-century tourist invention.