Châtenois

Châtenois is a village of about 4,000 on the Alsace wine route, 3 km west of Sélestat, at the mouth of the Villé valley below the Haut-Kœnigsbourg.

It is the gateway to that castle and to the Vosges valleys behind, and it has one thing nobody expects: a church tower with four storks’ nests built into the corner turrets, which has been the emblem of the village for a century.

The tower

The Romanesque bell tower of the twelfth century survived every rebuilding of the church around it. Its spire is flanked by four small pointed turrets, and storks have nested on them for generations — the whole thing is unmistakable from the wine route and is on every photograph of the village.

The church itself, Saint-Georges, was rebuilt in 1759 by Chassain, with a Silbermann-school organ.

The village

• Tour des Sorcières — the Witches’ Tower, the surviving gate of the fifteenth-century walls, with a wooden gallery on top
• The winegrowers’ houses — Renaissance and later, with dated lintels; Châtenois has an unusual number of them still in use by working growers
• The fountains and the flowered squares — the village takes its flowers seriously and holds four stars in the national competition
• Chapelle Sainte-Anne — on the hill above, with the view

The wine

Châtenois has around 200 hectares of vineyard on the granite and sandstone slopes below the Kœnigsbourg. There is no grand cru here, which is exactly why the wines are worth attention: the growers sell serious Riesling and Sylvaner at prices the famous villages have long left behind.

See the wines of Alsace.

The castles above

Three ruined castles stand on the ridge behind the village, and the walk up to them is the reason to stay longer than an hour:

• Ortenbourg — thirteenth-century, built by Rudolf of Habsburg, with a pentagonal keep 32 m high; an hour’s climb, and the finest of the three
• Ramstein — beside it, built expressly to besiege the Ortenbourg
• Haut-Kœnigsbourg — 15 minutes by road, restored for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the most visited castle in Alsace

Getting there

• By car — on the N59 / wine route. Sélestat 5 minutes, Colmar 25, Strasbourg 45. See parking in France.
• By train — Sélestat is the nearest station, on the Strasbourg–Basel main line, with buses on.
• By bike — the wine-route cycle path passes through.

Around

• Sélestat — 3 km, with the Humanist Library
• Haut-Kœnigsbourg — 15 minutes up
• Montagne des Singes and Volerie des Aigles — both nearby, and both aimed squarely at children
• Bergheim and Riquewihr — 10 and 15 km south
• Val de Villé — the valley behind, quiet and good for walking

When to go

May to October. Storks are on the tower from February to August. Châtenois is a working village on a main road rather than a picture-postcard stop — which makes it a sensible and much cheaper base for the middle of the wine route.

See Alsace.

Photo credits

Photographs on this page come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences:

• The street — Ralph Hammann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• The fountain — Aniacra, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• The view from the Ortenbourg — Espirat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Weather in Châtenois

Updated: 1 September 2026