Wissembourg Travel Video Guide

Wissembourg Travel Itinerary

• Maps and flag of France
• Wissembourg travel photos
• Wissembourg travel forum
• Flights to Wissembourg
• Hotels in Wissembourg
• Hostels in Wissembourg
• Buy the guide book!

WISSEMBOURG , 60km north of Strasbourg and right on the German border, is a small town of cobbled and higgledy-piggledy prettiness, largely given over to moneyed German weekenders. The townspeople have a curious linguistic anomaly; they speak an ancient dialect derived from Frankish, unlike their fellow Alsatians whose language is closer to modern German.

At the end of rue Nationale, the town's main commercial street, stands the imposing Gothic church of St-Paul-et-St-Pierre , with a Romanesque belfry and some fine twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass, once attached to the town's abbey. Beneath the apse, the meandering River Lauter flows under the Pont du Sel beside the town's most striking secular building and first hospital, the Maison du Sel (1450). A few minutes' walk away, on the northern edge of the town, another fine old building, with beautifully carved woodwork round its windows, contains the town's folk museum, the Musee Westercamp , 3 rue du Musee (Mon, Wed & Thurs 2-6pm, Fri & Sat 9am-noon & 2-6pm, Sun & hols 10am-noon & 2-6pm; closed Jan & Feb; 15F/?2.29). Along the southern edge of town, following the riverbank from the Tour des Husgenossen in the western corner, a long section of the medieval walls survives intact, built - like the houses - in the local red sandstone.

Nearby WOERTH , 25km southwest along the D27, has a museum dedicated to an important engagement in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War,

reconstructed here with the aid of 4000 lead soldiers (April-Oct daily except Tues 2-5pm; July & Aug daily except Tues 10am-noon & 2-6pm; Nov-March Sat & Sun 2-5pm; closed Jan; tel 03.88.09.30.21; 15F/?2.29). Those with a sweet tooth can indulge at the Restaurant Sans Alcool (tel 03.88.09.30.79; closed Mon), noted for its desserts and ice creams - it's moderately priced, with a lunchtime menu at 40F/?6.10, and the quality of cooking compensates for the ban on tobacco and alcohol.

Your Tips For Wissembourg

• Cote dAzur France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The Cote d'Azur polarizes opinions like few other places in France. - France
  

• Loire France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The density of chateaux and all their great Renaissance intrigues and associations can prove quite intimidating, but if you pick your castles selectively, rid yourself of a sense of duty to guided tours and spend days on river banks with supplies of cheese, fruit and white Loire wines, the Loire can be one of the most enjoyable of all French regions. - France
  

• Rhone valley and Provence France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Of all the areas of France, Provence is the most irresistible. - France
  

• North France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. - France
  

• Normandy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Though now firmly incorporated into the French mainstream, the seaboard province of Normandy has a history of prosperous independence as one of the crucial powers of medieval Europe. - France
  

• Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic Coast France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  News-stands selling Sud-Ouest remind you where you are: this is not the Mediterranean, certainly, but in summer the quality of the light, the warm air, the fields of sunflowers and the shuttered siesta-silence of the farmhouses give you the first exciting promises of the south. - France
  

• Burgundy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Peaceful, rural Burgundy is one of the most prosperous regions in modern France, but for centuries its powerful dukes remained independent of the French crown. - France
  

• Corsica France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Around one-and-three-quarter million people visit Corsica each year, drawn by a climate that's mild even in winter and by some of the most astonishingly diverse landscapes in Europe. - France
  

• Paris France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . - France
  

• Alsace-Lorraine and the Jura mountains France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  France's eastern frontier provinces, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte , where the Jura mountains lie, have had a complex and tumultuous history. - France
  

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  One of the loveliest spots on earth ? a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue ? a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents . - France
  

• Brittany France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. - France
  

• Dordogne Limousin and Lot France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The land covered in this section forms a rough oval bordered to the east by the uplands of the Massif Central and to the west by the Atlantic plains. - France
  

• Alps France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . - France
  

• Pyrenees France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Basque-speaking, wet and green in the west; craggy, snowy, Gascon-influenced in the middle; dry, Mediterranean and Catalan-speaking in the east - the Pyrenees are physically beautiful, culturally varied and considerably less developed than the Alps. - France
  

• Languedoc France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - France