Musée Unterlinden
You start in front of two buildings that tell two different stories. One is a 13th-century convent of Dominican nuns, with its cloister and chapel; the other is a Neo-Baroque public baths building from 1906. Between 2009 and 2015 the city turned the old baths into an annex and linked the two with a series of underground exhibition rooms, so today you walk from medieval vaults into a modern museum without going outside.
After the French Revolution the convent stood empty. It was saved by the Société Schongauer, a society founded in 1847 by Louis Hugot and named after Colmar's great painter, and the town handed the buildings over to it. The museum was established in 1849. At first its pride was a Roman mosaic found in Bergheim, still on display, and plaster casts of antique sculptures lent by the Louvre.
Everything changed in 1852, when the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald arrived, together with most of the large painted and carved altarpieces from Colmar's churches and from abbeys and monasteries of the Upper Rhine. A year later, in 1853, the doors opened to the public. With around 200,000 visitors a year it is the most visited museum in Alsace.
Is it worth going in? If you care about art even a little, yes: the altarpiece alone justifies the ticket, and the collection runs from prehistory to contemporary works. Give it two hours and come at opening time. If you only have a morning for the town itself, admire the convent from outside and come back another day.
From here it is 290 m, about 4 minutes, to the Dominican Church. On the way you pass Bartholdi's statue of Martin Schongauer, a fitting introduction to the painting that waits at the next stop.
