Grand-Est

Strasbourg stands on the Rhine facing the German town of Kehl, and its old centre, the Grande Île, is an island in the River Ill, on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Neustadt quarter beside it. The pink sandstone cathedral and its astronomical clock, the canals and timber-framed houses of Petite France and the Christmas market draw most visitors, while the European Parliament and the Council of Europe sit in a quarter of their own to the north-east.

The Route des Vins d'Alsace runs about 170 kilometres from Marlenheim, west of Strasbourg, south to Thann, along the foot of the Vosges where the vineyards climb between the forest and the plain. Its wine towns and villages keep walls, gate towers and timber-framed houses along a main street: Obernai and Barr in the north, Ribeauvillé, Riquewihr, Kaysersberg and Turckheim near Colmar, and Eguisheim just south of it, its lanes laid out in rings around a castle. Family wineries in nearly every village pour Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewürztraminer and the sparkling Crémant d'Alsace, and, unlike most French wine, an Alsace bottle is labelled by its grape. Above Orschwiller, the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg, a castle rebuilt in the early twentieth century, looks across the plain to the Black Forest.

Colmar, the main town of the wine route, lies about half an hour south of Strasbourg by train, and its old centre of timber-framed and painted houses is small enough to walk. In the quarter called Little Venice, the River Lauch runs between timber-framed houses built to the water's edge. The Unterlinden Museum, in a former convent, holds the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald in the early sixteenth century for the monastery at Isenheim.

West of the wine route, the Vosges rise in rounded, forested summits called ballons, the highest of them the Grand Ballon at 1,424 metres. The Route des Crêtes follows the main ridge south from the Col du Bonhomme past the Hohneck to the Grand Ballon, over high pastures with views east across the Rhine plain to the Black Forest. On the pastures, fermes-auberges, farm inns, serve the repas marcaire, the cowherds' meal of meat pie, potatoes and Munster, the soft cheese of the Vosges valleys. On the Lorraine side, the town of Gérardmer stands on a lake of glacial origin, a base for walking and swimming in summer.

Nancy, once the seat of the dukes of Lorraine, centres on the Place Stanislas, an eighteenth-century square closed at its corners by gilded wrought-iron gates and fountains, and on the UNESCO World Heritage List with the Place de la Carrière and the Place d'Alliance beside it. Around 1900 the city was a centre of Art Nouveau: the École de Nancy of the glassmaker Émile Gallé, the Daum glassworks and the cabinetmaker Louis Majorelle. Their glass and furniture fill the Musée de l'École de Nancy, and the villas and shopfronts of the movement stand in streets across the city.

Metz, on the Moselle north of Nancy, is built of Jaumont stone, a yellow limestone that colours its old centre. The nave of its Cathédrale Saint-Étienne rises some 40 metres, walled with so much stained glass, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth and including windows by Marc Chagall, that the cathedral is called “the Lantern of God”. Beside the railway station, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a branch of the Paris museum under a roof of woven timber, shows modern and contemporary art in changing exhibitions.

Verdun, on the Meuse west of Metz, is the town of the 1916 battlefield, and its memorials lie in the forest on the hills to the north-east. The main sites are the Douaumont Ossuary, its tall tower above the national cemetery, the forts of Douaumont and Vaux, and the Mémorial de Verdun museum at Fleury-devant-Douaumont, a few kilometres apart along the battlefield roads. They are reached by car or on guided tours from the town.

Reims, the largest city of Champagne, is built around the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, where most of the kings of France were crowned; its west front is carved with hundreds of statues, among them the Smiling Angel beside the north doorway. The Palace of Tau next to it, once the archbishops' palace, now shows the cathedral's original statues and its treasury, and with the Basilica of Saint-Remi across town the three are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Under the city, the Champagne houses age their bottles in chalk galleries, some of them in Gallo-Roman chalk pits known as crayères on the Saint-Nicaise hill.

Épernay, on the Marne about half an hour south of Reims by train, lines its Avenue de Champagne with the mansions of the great houses, their cellars running for kilometres beneath it. Around the town the vineyards cover the slopes of the Montagne de Reims to the north, the valley of the Marne and, to the south, the Côte des Blancs, planted almost entirely with Chardonnay. UNESCO lists the Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars: the historic slopes of Hautvillers, Aÿ and Mareuil-sur-Ay, the Saint-Nicaise hill in Reims and the Avenue de Champagne. Hautvillers, above the Marne, is the village of the abbey where the monk Dom Pérignon kept the cellars, and the signed Route Touristique du Champagne links it with the grand cru villages.

Troyes, on the Seine in the south of Champagne, was the capital of the counts of Champagne, and its old centre keeps streets of timber-framed houses inside an outline shaped on the map like a Champagne cork. Its cathedral and churches are rich in stained glass, much of it from the sixteenth century, which the Cité du Vitrail in the old Hôtel-Dieu shows at eye level. South-east of the city, the Côte des Bar around Bar-sur-Seine and Bar-sur-Aube is Champagne's southern vineyard, planted mostly with Pinot Noir.