Colmar

The colours are improbable. Pink, pale blue, mint green, butter yellow — half-timbered façades painted in washed-out pastels and reflected in canals so calm the reflection looks more solid than the building above. Colmar in France is Alsace distilled into a single old town, the timber frames leaning at angles that predate the idea of plumb lines.

Colmar sits on the Alsatian wine route in the Upper Rhine plain, sheltered by the Vosges mountains which make it one of the driest towns in France, with less than 600 millimetres of rain annually. The Petite Venise quarter — a canal district of fishermen's and tanners' houses — dates from the 14th century and remains navigable by flat-bottomed boat. The Unterlinden Museum, housed in a 13th-century Dominican convent, holds Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, painted between 1512 and 1516, considered one of the masterworks of northern European art. Colmar was the birthplace of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty — the house museum and a quarter-scale replica stand in the city. The town's half-timbered architecture spans the 14th to 17th centuries, concentrated along the Rue des Marchands and the Place de l'Ancienne Douane.