Obernai

The market square of Obernai with the belfry and town hall

Obernai is the second most visited town in the Bas-Rhin after Strasbourg, and the one place on the Alsace wine route you can reach without a car. It sits between Strasbourg and Colmar at the foot of Mont Sainte-Odile, still ringed by its ramparts, and it is a complete Alsatian town: timber frames, geraniums, a Renaissance well, a belfry and a market square.

If you are exploring around Strasbourg without a car, this is the stop that makes the combination of convenience and beauty worth it.

A little history

The territory belonged to the dukes of Alsace in the seventh century and is the birthplace of Saint Odile, the duke’s daughter and later patron saint of Alsace — born blind, according to the legend, and rejected by her father. Her abbey stands on the mountain above the town.

Obernai first appears by name in 1240, when it became a town under the Hohenstaufen. It joined the Décapole in 1354, the league of ten free imperial cities of Alsace, and its high point came in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the emperor Ferdinand I visited in 1562. The Thirty Years’ War ruined it: occupied first by imperial troops, then by the Swedes. It was bought out and handed to France in 1679, and recovered some of its prosperity without ever regaining its standing.

Place du Marché

The Kapellturm belfry above the houses of Obernai

Everything is on or beside the market square:

  • Kapellturm — the thirteenth-century belfry, all that remains of a chapel demolished in the eighteenth century, with a Gothic spire and four corner turrets added in 1597. It is the town’s silhouette.
  • Hôtel de Ville — fifteenth-century, with an oriel and a painted council chamber
  • Halle aux Blés — the corn hall of 1554, which was also the butchers’ hall, with a stork on the gable
  • Puits aux Six Seaux — the Renaissance well of 1579 with six buckets on three wheels, one of the best in Alsace

The Halle aux Blés, the sixteenth-century corn hall of Obernai

The rest of the town

A street of timber-framed houses in Obernai

  • Église Saints-Pierre-et-Paul — neo-Gothic, built 1867–72, holding a fifteenth-century Holy Sepulchre and windows saved from earlier churches
  • The ramparts — a double ring survives almost entire, with a walk right round the outside under the walls. This is the best half-hour in Obernai and almost nobody does it.
  • Rue du Général Gouraud and the lanes off it — the timber-framed houses, some sixteenth-century, with carved beams and vintners’ emblems
  • The vineyards immediately outside the walls; the Zotzenberg grand cru is just south at Mittelbergheim

The church and the Renaissance well in Obernai

The town wall and towers of Obernai

Getting to Obernai

  • By train — regional trains from Strasbourg take about 30 minutes and run regularly. The station is a few minutes’ walk from the old town. This is the easy option and the reason Obernai is on this list.
  • By bus — services along the wine route, and up to Mont Sainte-Odile in season.
  • By car — on the wine route between Strasbourg and Colmar. Park outside the walls. See parking in France.

The old town takes an hour and a half to walk properly, half a day with lunch and the ramparts.

What to eat

Café terraces around the fountain on the market square of Obernai

Alsatian, and Obernai does it well: tarte flambée — thin dough with cream, bacon and onion, cooked in a wood oven and eaten with the fingers — choucroute, baeckeoffe, and munster with cumin. The surrounding canton includes Krautergersheim, which calls itself the sauerkraut capital of France and grows most of the country’s cabbage for it.

See the cooking of Alsace.

Festivals

  • Fête des Vendanges — the harvest festival in mid-October, with a procession and the new wine
  • Christmas market — through December, and one of the prettiest in Alsace precisely because the town is small
  • Summer folk evenings on the market square

Around Obernai

The belfry of Obernai above the square

  • Mont Sainte-Odile — the abbey on a cliff 12 km west, founded by Odile, with a view over the whole Rhine plain and the mysterious Mur Païen, a prehistoric wall 10 km long around the summit
  • Barr and Mittelbergheim — the next wine villages south
  • Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg — the great restored castle on the ridge, 40 minutes away
  • Strasbourg — 30 minutes by train
  • Colmar — 45 minutes south, and the rest of the wine route between them

When to go

September and October for the harvest, May and June for the flowers, December for the Christmas market. Obernai is small enough that a coach party fills the square — mornings are calmer than afternoons.

See Alsace and the most beautiful villages in France.

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