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Colmar has an important wine fair in August, and it is also the seat of the Association of Alsatian wine-growers. The great feature of the Alsatian wine is that it is the only wine in France named after the variety of the grape, and it is not usually blended. Like its cousins the Hock and Moselle wines, it can be drunk very young, at most two or three years after harvesting. It is interesting that the local consumption of red wines is so high as to be a serious social problem; nevertheless it is obvious that the white wines have an important place in the tourist industry, which is itself officially considered highly important.

All this sounds matter-of-fact and statistical, but it underlines the truth that this charming quiet town, which someone suggested was ‘the truffle in the foie gras’ , is at a point of decision. And what of the town itself, with its view across the bridges to lilac-lined gardens and the eaves of timbered houses backing onto ‘little Venice’? Apart from the twisted mediaeval streets, the ‘cathedral’ and the Dominican church, there is a municipal theatre, small but highly decorative, with visiting companies from the Strasbourg Opera and the Comédie Francaise, and even Jean Marais. There is a fine old municipal library in the Dominican monastery which has been recently modernized. There is one of the most up-to-date hospitals in France, completed just before the war, with an important radiological department.

In addition to its lycees and college technique (the grammar and secondary modern schools), it is going to build a cite technique, to contain among other departments a national School of Commercial Textile Sales. The Champ de Mars, a symmetrical park, has at one end F. A. Bartholdi’s statue of General Rapp and at the other the Prefecture built in 1865 under the Second Empire. The railway station was built in 1903 under the first German occupation. Indeed, it is the only sign of that unwelcome interlude, just as the statue of Admiral Bruat, also by Bartholdi, being restored to its position, is the only reminder in Colmar itself of the second occupation. (In the country round about, however, complete villages like Bennwihr were ruined in the fight for the Colmar pocket in 1945.)

Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour and the Lion of Belfort, was a native of Colmar. The house in which he was born is now the best sort of museum, filled with furniture from his Paris apartment (and pretty startling some of it is) and with casts and maquettes of his works. It is quiet and peaceful, but far from neglected. Only when one counts the unending models in it does one realize that a large part of the municipal sculpture in France would appear to be by him. He died not sixty years ago, in 1904, and we probably live too close to him to see that he was in fact a very con­siderable artist in the academic style. An even greater local figure is still living, for Albert

That future is bound up with the Common Market. Colmar lies ten miles or so from the Rhine, and here by Neuf-Brisach there is a major road crossing the river from Freiburg in Germany, which has just been wisely connected with Colmar by a wide new road. Near this crossing is the meeting-point of the Rhine itself and the parallel Grand Canal d’Alsace from Basle, and through Neuf-Brisach passes the Rhine-Rhone Canal. As part of their scheme for the exploitation of the Rhine, the Electricité de France have recently built a large power station at Vogelgrun, beyond Neuf-Brisach, one of several along the Rhine. There are vast power sluices for the barge traffic, for Strasbourg, forty-five miles downstream, is the sixth port in France. This immense enterprise at Vogelgrun lies in a sweep of concrete and lawn astride the main road from Germany.

Alongside the power station the city of Colmar has started a port with over 800 yards of quays. It is still in the process of building, but is already used, for instance, for a valuable if small export of gravel to Holland. There is a silo for 10,000 tons of grain and there is to be a chai or warehouse for wines—not for those of Alsace especially but from France generally—which will handle between 330,000 and 440,000 gallons. Industry is to be encouraged, but only of a sort that requires the proximity of the Rhine harbour. An area on a promontory has been reserved for tourism: there is provision for a hotel, a yacht-harbour, camping and a heliport. The production of wine is an important industry around Colmar; about 15,000,000 gallons were produced in 1959, of which nearly 500,000 gallons were exported—a tenth of it to Great Britain—bringing a useful revenue of 632,000,000 old francs (about £460,000) to Alsace.

All Alsatian wine is white. Between 1871 and 1918 the quality was neglected; these were also the years of phylloxera. The Germans permitted the addition of sugar to the wines and the vines were allowed to deteriorate into hybrids for ordinary table wines. Now the vintners are trying to produce only the Sylvaner, slightly earthy, sometimes sparkling; the Riesling, a fine dry wine, spicy and with a touch of Muscat; the Muscat itself; the white Pinot Blanc which has been produced for ages in Alsace; and, finest of all, Gewurztraminer, which has the finest bouquet of any in the world, brimming with a raisin sweetness in the glass, with a scent of a full-blown rose. It is this and the Riesling that have made the fame of Alsatian wines.

The vineyards are mostly small. Riquewihr, the most important wine town in the neighbour­hood, with just under 2000 inhabitants, has only five owners with more than twelve acres, nine with five to twelve acres, and 386 with less than five acres. The last-named owners work the vineyards part time, either farming or carrying on some other trade as well. There are eleven wine cooperatives in Alsace to help market the smaller vineyard products. Some villages own such cooperatives, and four of these are within a few miles of Colmar. Colmar itself has an important cooperative with, in addition, a considerable production of grape and apple juice. By now the process of improving the quality of the vines has proceeded so far that a third of the vines produce vins nobles (of the varieties mentioned above). Nearly half of these wines are sold outside Alsace and 7 per cent of this is exported abroad. The largest firm in Riquewihr, with only 124 acres of its own, has fifty-five glass-lined cisterns in its cellars and produces 2,000,000 bottles of wine a year, a quarter being for export. The extra grapes are bought locally and pressed on their premises. The grapes are pressed three times, the first pressing producing the best wine. Wine is also made by the champagne process in this large concern, mostly for export to England. They employ 150 people, and double that number at the harvest; but local labour for the vineyards, and for the forests, is hard to get, as people—here as elsewhere—are leaving the land for industry.

THE plain of Alsace is bounded on the east by the mud-grey Rhine, heavy with barges, and on the west by the Vosges, with vineyards and little towns in its foothills and deep valleys of green-black pine forests rising to highlands covered with blueberries and cranberries in the autumn and with snow in the winter. To the north is Strasbourg, and to the south Mulhouse. A third of the way up the plain lies Colmar, capital of the Department of the Haut-Rhin. It is a small town of just over 50,000 inhabitants, with as its centre a ‘cathedral’ (or so they call it) of brilliant orange and red sandstone, a variation on Strasbourg’s strawberry pink. In this, the col­legiate church of St Martin, built between 1234 and 1300, is Martin Schongauer’s masterpiece, The Madonna of the Rose-bower. Not far off, the convent of the Dominican Sisters, the Unterlinden, houses what is undoubtedly the most important single object inGrunewald’sting, Griinewald’s fabulous Isenheim altarpiece, of four wings each painted on both sides in brilliant colour, which has remained untouched by restoration. Two of the nine panels of the 16th-cen­tury altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald, from the Antonite Monastery of Isen­heim, now in the Unterlinden, Colmar. (Opposite) The temptation of St Antony; and (right) the Visit of St Paul to St Antony in the Desert in many ways the most moving scenes in European art. Twice it has been miraculously preserved, first during the French Revolution, and secondly during World War II by a German official. These two paintings are the magnets that draw the student of art and the tourists, who linger in Colmar a day or only part of a day, and then hurry on north or south. They are the highlights of the romantic side of the old town with its twisting streets named after the various guilds: the Rue des Marchands, des Chausseurs, des Tanneurs, de la Poissonnerie. The last has kept its name and its activity since the Middle Ages, with wooden cages full of carp set in the shallow green Lauch that runs sluggishly through the town and on towards Strasbourg.

But the ordinary traveller finds his pleasure in houses like the Maison des ‘Tetes, with its famous restaurant, serving coq au riesling, or the little restaurant of Illhaeusern on the Ill, a few miles to the north, which is the best in the whole region; for good food is also one of Colmar’s attractions. From the nearby valley of Munster comes the famous soft camembert type of cheese, with its pungent and penetrating farmyard smell and taste. Pâtés de foie gras are no longer made at home, in the farmhouses around the town, but come mostly from Strasbourg, and even then the livers used are imported to a great extent from Hungary. These, and the cherry and strawberry tarts, the chickens and asparagus of the plain, are accompanied by Alsatian wines, for Colmar is the centre of Alsatian wine production. There are also four eaux de vie: Kirsch made from cherries, Mirabelle and Quetsche from Mirabelle plums and damsons, and the most elusive of all, Framboise, distilled from wild raspberries, for which there is now little labour to be found for the picking; if genuine, Framboise now comes only pri­vately from farmers whose tall white bottles have a stamp-paper label.

But the romantic aspects of Colmar and its surrounding vil­lages conceal a most remarkable spirit of change.

Colmar was a Free City in the Middle Ages, and became French in 1648 under the Treaty of West­phalia, whereas Strasbourg itself did not become French until 1681. Colmar was a judicial centre, and on the removal of the king’s representative to Strasbourg it re­mained so and is still the seat of the Court of Appeal for Alsace.

The population of Colmar was 13,296 in 1801. In 1871 it was 22,311, and by 1913 it had doubled to about 46,000. This was because of the increased textile industry, principally dyeing, cotton, wool, jute and silk mills, in the area of the town. Originally these mills had been in the valleys and on a small scale; but there and up in the Vosges, rural life is too difficult for modern tastes, the farms are too small, the work too arduous and the methods too old-fashioned, and Colmar as a result is now becoming an important industrial centre. Houses are being built at the rate of 500 a Schongauer year, and it is intended to have accommodation for 30,000 more workers. Apart from the textiles, with eighty-one factories and 15,000 workers, there are smaller paper and wood industries, and in addition there are mineral-water, sauerkraut, cheese, noodle, liqueur and vinegar factories. But there are other factors which point to an increasingly prosperous future for Colmar.

It is hard to believe anyone would be interested in visiting a salt mine today but when the mine happens to be one of the oldest in the world and also happens to be home to one of the wonders of the world, it seems logical to see millions of tourists from around the world coming over to Krakow in Poland to see and explore the mine and the underground chapel called the Blessed Kinga. Though Polish government is shutting down all old mines, this one remains one of the most popular and conserved mines that also happens to be on UNESCO’s list of Cultural and Natural heritages of the world. If you are on a week long trip to this beautiful East European country, try renting one of the Warsaw apartments and then proceed to Krakow from where the salt mine is very close. The reason I suggest staying in apartments is because they are not only inexpensive, they give more freedom and privacy than expensive hotels in the city. The trend all over Europe is the same and that is why an apartment in London or an apartment in Budapest is a lucrative business these days.

The importance of Wieliczka Salt Mine should be understood thinking about medieval times when salt was like petrol of today and merchants made huge sums of money selling salt apartment Rome. The mine was started in 13^th century but the world got to know about it only in the 17th century by the accounts given by a traveling Frenchman. Since then, Wieliczka Salt Mine has been visited by not only millions of tourists but also celebrities and royalties of the world.  The mine still produces salt making it the 2^nd oldest salt mines in the world. Interestingly, the oldest mine is also in Poland near Krakow.

Reaching the salt mine is not difficult as it lies in the southeast outskirts of Krakow city. Just take a bus to the salt mine from the old post office in Krakow though checking on the exact departure time is advisable. As the mine falls in between the route of the bus, ask a friendly Pole to let you get off the bus at the right stop.

When you get to the place, the guide of the mine asks you to enter the mine through a staircase that makes you feel as if you are going to the center of the earth. Budapest apartments, Chapel of the Blessed Kinga is the major attraction of the mine though there are other smaller chapels. What is astonishing is the fact that the chapel has been made not by any outsider by miners who worked inside the mine. As you have to take a guided tour, you are supposed to stop at a place for as much time as is allotted to other tourists.

Be prepared to walk around 2 KM and the entire tour takes about 34 hours to complete apartments Miami. The mine also houses a museum of mining that contains exhibits of ancient equipment used for mining.