Riquewihr

Interesting facts

One of the village's tallest half-timbered houses, built in 1561, is nicknamed the Gratte-Ciel, the Skyscraper.

The Jules Verne adaptation Maître Zacharius, a French television film of 1973, was largely shot in Riquewihr's streets.

The Dolder gate tower appears in The 10th Kingdom, an Anglo-German-American fantasy miniseries.

Riquewihr's escape from destruction in the Second World War is credited partly to its dead-end position.

Riquewihr gained the status of a town in 1320, before passing to the counts of Württemberg four years later.

The nearby castle of Reichenstein was destroyed in 1269 by Rudolf of Habsburg, two decades before the village walls went up.

The five-storey Dolder houses a small museum with weapons from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and old winemaking tools.

The Thieves' Tower still shows a period torture chamber and an oubliette, a dungeon reached only through a hole in the ceiling.

The Cour de l'Abbaye d'Autrey, a building of 1510 restored in the 1570s and 1580s, keeps a vaulted ceiling with eight ribs.

The Hansi museum holds about 150 works by the illustrator, including lithographs, watercolours, wine labels and postcards.

Why it is worth it

Riquewihr is a walled wine village that has kept the look of the sixteenth century almost intact: half-timbered houses line a main street that climbs gently to the great gate tower at the top of the village. It sits among vineyards on the Alsace Wine Route, at the foot of the Vosges, and two of the slopes around it, Schoenenbourg and Sporen, are classified Alsace grands crus.

The village appears in a document of 1049 under the name Richovilare, and by 1094 a nearby abbey already owned vines here. In 1291 the lords of Horbourg enclosed it with a rectangular wall pierced by three gates and ringed by a deep ditch, turning it into a compact stronghold roughly 300 by 220 metres. The Dolder, the gate tower built with that wall, still stands about 25 metres tall, its outer face severe and military, its town side softened by timber framing. Around 1500, as firearms spread, a second wall was added on the more exposed sides, and the Upper Gate from that period still shows traces of its drawbridge; its portcullis, installed around 1500, is among the oldest in Europe. The Thieves' Tower, the old town prison, completes the defences.

In 1324 the village passed to the counts of Württemberg, who later also held Montbéliard and governed both territories together. The wine trade carried Riquewihr's production across the Empire and as far as the Hanseatic ports, and that wealth paid for the many sixteenth-century burghers' houses, carved wells and fountains, including the Sinne fountain of 1560, that give the streets their character. The lordship turned Lutheran in 1534; the Württemberg castle, built in 1539 with a Renaissance gable, is a listed monument. The Thirty Years' War brought sieges and plunder, and in 1786 a treaty finally attached the village to France. During the Second World War, when neighbouring wine villages were largely destroyed, Riquewihr was spared, which is why its medieval and Renaissance fabric survives so completely. The illustrator Jean-Jacques Waltz, known as Hansi, has a small museum here, and the village belongs to the association of the Most Beautiful Villages of France.

Getting there

Riquewihr lies about 10.5 km from Colmar, the nearest city and the regional rail hub. The nearest airport is Strasbourg Airport (SXB), about 48 km away. The village is on the Alsace Wine Route between Ribeauvillé and Kaysersberg.

Riquewihr

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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