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There's no denying Alsace 's attractiveness, with its old stone and half-timbered towns set amid the thickly wooded hills of the Vosges, but it's a quaintness that has become a commodity. Strasbourg , the Alsatian capital and, along with Brussels, one of the main centres of the European Union, escapes the tweeness of some of the smaller towns of the foothills. Saverne and Wissembourg , to the north, also avoid the worst of the tourist-brochure image, giving access to some spectacular ruined castles in the northern Vosges . South of Strasbourg, along the Route du Vin , there are countless picturesque medieval villages and yet more ruined castles which suffer to varying degrees from the attention of the tour buses. A very different, sobering experience is the concentration camp of Le Struthof , hidden away in the Vosges forest. Colmar is almost excessively twee, yet still worth a visit for Grunewald's amazing Issenheim altarpiece. By contrast, Mulhouse is thoroughly industrial but boasts some unusually good museums devoted to cars, trains, electricity and printed fabrics. Every town has a tourist office , which in smaller places is usually in the Mairie or Hotel de Ville. Special tourist maps cost around 3F/?0.46, but free maps containing a reasonable amount of information are always available.
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