Alsace Christmas Markets From Strasbourg

Once you have done the Strasbourg markets, the question always arrives: what about the Alsace villages, and how do you get to them?

The honest answer is that it depends on two things, the day you travel and whether you have a car. Colmar is half an hour by train and a half day trip you do without thinking. Riquewihr, forty kilometres or twenty-five miles further on, can only be reached without a car from Friday to Sunday, on a paid shuttle bus out of Colmar.

This guide ranks the markets worth the detour by their real difficulty of access from Strasbourg, which is not the same thing as their distance.

The rule that covers everything

Christmas Alsace reads as three circles from Strasbourg.

• The direct train circle: Obernai, Sélestat, Molsheim, Haguenau, Colmar, Mulhouse. You step off the train and the market is five to ten minutes' walk away. Nothing to organise.
• The shuttle circle: Kaysersberg, Riquewihr, Ribeauvillé, Eguisheim. Reachable only on the seasonal Christmas shuttle buses from Colmar, which run on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays only, up to the last weekend before Christmas.
• The car circle: Rosheim, Gertwiller, and Molsheim outside its own market weekend. Small one off markets with no dedicated transport.

Picking the wrong circle means spending a day in transit for two hours of chalets. It is the most common mistake made by visitors improvising a trip out of Strasbourg.

Circle 1: the ones you do by train, with nothing to organise

Colmar, the hub

Colmar is the only serious rival to Strasbourg and the compulsory gateway to the wine villages. It runs 6 markets across the historic centre, brighter and tighter than Strasbourg and a notch less overwhelming.

It is also one of the few towns to have already published its 2026 dates: 23 November to 29 December 2026, open 11am to 7pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 8pm Friday to Sunday, with 11am to 5pm on 24 December. The food market and the big wheel run on until 3 January.

That single difference decides a lot of year end trips, since Strasbourg stops on 24 December. What Colmar is actually like on the day is in our Colmar Christmas market page.

• From Strasbourg: trains on the Strasbourg to Mulhouse and Basel line run every 30 minutes through the day and take 26 to 35 minutes. Colmar station is 15 to 20 minutes on foot from the old town, or a few minutes on a TRACE city bus.
• By car: about an hour on the A35, then the park and ride at the Parc des Expositions at 3 € a day on some weekends, with a free shuttle every ten minutes into the centre.
• The good slot: Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday morning. Friday after 4pm and every December Saturday are saturated.

Obernai, the most comfortable without a car

Half an hour by train, a station seven minutes' walk from the centre, and a food and craft market set among the half-timbered houses. It opens in late November and, unlike Strasbourg, runs past Christmas to the end of December, with shortened hours on 24 and 31 December.

The detail that matters: the outlying car parks are free and served at weekends by a Christmas shuttle bus. If you drive, do not try to park in the centre.

Sélestat, the home of the Christmas tree

Trains every 15 to 30 minutes, 20 minutes on the fastest services, and chalets five minutes' walk from the station. After Obernai it is the easiest return trip of the lot.

The interest of Sélestat is not its size but its history. The town holds the earliest known written mention of the Christmas tree, dated 1521, and builds its whole programme around it, with exhibitions in the churches and a trail through the Humanist Library. This is the trip to make if you have already seen Strasbourg three times.

Haguenau and Mulhouse, the two overlooked ones

Haguenau is cited by the tourist offices as the only market in northern Alsace open for five straight weeks, with around sixty stallholders and a strongly family atmosphere. Trains from Strasbourg run several times an hour and take 25 to 35 minutes.

Mulhouse is 50 minutes away but plays a different game: around a hundred chalets, well over a million visitors, and a real identity built around the étoffe de Noël, a Christmas fabric redesigned every year. The station is ten minutes on foot from Place de la Réunion.

Across the Rhine, by tram

One option the French guides skip entirely, and the easiest of all. Strasbourg's tram D crosses the Rhine into Kehl, in Germany, in 24 minutes from Homme-de-Fer, running every 13 to 16 minutes through the day.

Several German towns along that stretch of the Rhine run their own Christmas markets, smaller and less photographed than the Alsace ones, and reaching the first of them takes a tram ticket rather than a train booking. Check the dates on the individual town's site, because they do not follow the Alsace calendar.

Bring your passport or ID card. It is an ordinary tram across an internal border, but the market perimeter on the Strasbourg side has random identity checks and you may as well be carrying it.

Circle 2: the wine villages, hostage to the shuttles

This is where weekends go wrong. Kaysersberg, Riquewihr, Ribeauvillé and Eguisheim are the four villages everyone has seen photographed, and not one of them has a railway station. The official answer is the seasonal Christmas shuttle from Colmar station.

• Lines 1 and 2: Colmar to Kaysersberg, Riquewihr, Ribeauvillé and back, running on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays during the market period. Roughly hourly on the Friday, more frequent at weekends.
• They are paid, on a flat daily fare that gives unlimited trips around the loop, with free travel for young children. Check the current fare on the Colmar tourist office site, it is reset each season.
• Line 3 serves Eguisheim on the same days, with compulsory online booking and a limited number of seats. Do not count on buying a ticket at the stop.

What that means in practice: from Strasbourg, a day in Riquewihr is a train to Colmar, then a shuttle, then the same in reverse in the evening. It works, but only from Friday to Sunday, and only if you have checked the time of the last bus.

What each village has

• Kaysersberg: the four Advent weekends only, Friday to Sunday, with around thirty stalls of selected craft in the Arsenal courtyard and behind the church. No mass produced stands at all, which is both its reputation and the reason for its Saturday crowd.
• Riquewihr: open continuously through the period, along a decorated main street that is already one of the most visited sights in Alsace the rest of the year. Come early, or midweek with a car.
• Ribeauvillé: the medieval market, and the most spectacular on the list, with fire jugglers, a boar on a spit and beer served in pottery. But two weekends only in December. If you drive, use the seasonal park and ride at Bergheim, one flat fare per vehicle including the shuttle for everyone in it.
• Eguisheim: the longest and the most intimate, open continuously from late November into the days after Christmas, closed on 24, 25 and 26 December. Thirty or so craftspeople in a listed circular village.

Turckheim and Munster, the two accessible exceptions

These two escape the shuttle rule because they sit on a railway line. Turckheim is reached by the Colmar to Munster train, with a station 150 metres from Place Turenne. Its market runs from late November into the days after Christmas, and the night watchman does his round at 9pm every evening, after a giant Advent calendar window is opened in the late afternoon.

Munster, further up the valley, holds a mountain market that is one of the first to open and the last to close in Alsace.

The table we wish we had found

Three mistakes not to make

• Setting off for Riquewihr on a Tuesday. The shuttles only run Friday to Sunday. Outside those days the village is reachable on scheduled buses at the cost of an entire day in transit.
• Assuming "Alsace Christmas market" means "open every day". Kaysersberg runs the Advent weekends only, Ribeauvillé two weekends, Molsheim one. Check the village's own dates before you book a train.
• Chaining three villages in a day. With the shuttles, two villages is a decent rhythm. Three is a day spent waiting for buses.

Where to base yourself

Strasbourg is the right base. It is where the trains leave from, it has far more hotel rooms than Colmar in December, and it has its own market waiting when you get back in the evening.

If you would rather sleep among the vines, book very early: the villages have only a few dozen rooms between them, and they sell out first.

What is not yet known for 2026

Only some of these towns have published their full 2026 calendar. The others announce that the market will run again without giving official dates, and the regional rail passes for December are usually released in the autumn.

Strasbourg itself is in that second group: the city has not published its 2026 dates, and any site showing them is guessing. This page is updated as the dates land.

For the rest of the preparation, our Christmas market FAQ and, if you are choosing between the two big markets, Colmar or Strasbourg. Outside the Christmas season these same villages are covered in the most beautiful villages in Alsace and the Alsace wine route.

Sources: noel-colmar.com and tourisme-colmar.com (2026 dates and hours, car parks, shuttles), the tourist offices of Obernai, Sélestat, Eguisheim-Rouffach, Kaysersberg Vignoble, Turckheim, the Munster valley and Wissembourg, the city of Mulhouse, noel.alsace, DNA and the regional press (2025 editions), Fluo Grand Est and SNCF Connect for the rail links. Train times and 2026 fares must be confirmed when you book.