Mulhouse and the Three Borders region: France, Switzerland, Germany

Mulhouse occupies the south of Alsace, on a plain shared by three states. The tourist office puts it simply: the city lies at the meeting point of France, Germany and Switzerland, and crossing from one country to another takes less than an hour. The Rhine forms the border with Baden, while the Swiss border runs a few dozen kilometres further south, towards Basel. This geography explains the double reading of the area: you come for Alsace, and take the chance to see two other countries without changing accommodation.

In practice this changes how a stay is organised. Rather than shifting your luggage every two days, you settle in Mulhouse and radiate outwards. A day in Basel, another in the Black Forest, a third in the Alsace vineyards: the journeys stay short and are usually made by train. Visit Alsace indeed lists Basel and the Three Countries as a destination in their own right, alongside the Sundgau or the Alsace Wine Route.

Mulhouse station sits on the TGV Est and TGV Rhin-Rhône lines. The tourist office reports around forty TGV services a day, with Paris about 2 hours 40, Lyon 2 hours 45, Zurich 1 hour 20 and Stuttgart 2 hours 10. These times give a good sense of the scale: the major Swiss and German cities of the Upper Rhine are day returns. The regional network completes the picture towards the other Alsatian towns, which lets you leave the car behind.

By air, EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg is some thirty kilometres from the city. It is the Three Borders region’s platform: the tourist office reports close to a hundred destinations served each week across some thirty countries. A shuttle combining bus and train links the airport to central Mulhouse in about twenty minutes. By car, the A35 and A36 motorways serve the city, and the Alsatian motorway network remains toll-free.

Basel is the nearest large Swiss city to Mulhouse, and the tourist office puts it at the head of cross-border excursions. It is very well suited to a day trip, leaving the car behind. Visit Alsace ranks Basel and the Three Countries among its destinations and flags a local habit that often surprises visitors: swimming in the Rhine, practised in the middle of the city as soon as the weather turns. The river shapes the city as it shapes the whole Upper Rhine region.

On the German side, Freiburg im Breisgau opens the door to the Black Forest. The Mulhouse tourist office lists it among possible excursions and notes that it is reached by following the Rhône to Rhine canal and then the Rhine valley. The massif begins just behind the city: forests, valleys and hill villages, only a few dozen kilometres from the Alsatian vineyards. For cyclists, Visit Alsace describes a route linking the three countries on a single cross-border loop.

The Écomusée d’Alsace is at Ungersheim, a few kilometres from Mulhouse. It is a reconstructed village: eighty buildings representative of Alsace have been re-erected there, including a fortified tower, a sawmill and a potter’s workshop. The project was born in 1971 from a wish to save houses due for demolition. The site opened to the public in 1984 with only about twenty buildings, and today runs with some three hundred volunteers.

The visit is not limited to architecture. Craftspeople work on site, potters, bakers, blacksmiths or barbers, and give demonstrations. The site also hosts guided visits, exhibitions, workshops and boat rides. The Forest of Games, laid out for families, addresses environmental protection. The programme follows the seasons, with the Village Fête and the Folk’Estival in summer, then a Christmas season in December.

Southern Alsace works as a single living area spread across three states. Saint-Louis Agglomération, created on 1 January 2017 from the merger of three inter-municipal bodies, gives the measure: forty towns, 269 square kilometres, more than 80,000 inhabitants and 110 nationalities. The area shares a border with Germany to the east and with Switzerland to the south, and its population grows by about 1 per cent a year, close to 750 arrivals annually. The nearness of the Basel and Baden economic hubs explains much of that growth.

The institutions have followed. The Trinational Eurodistrict Basel serves as a cooperation platform for the cross-border conurbation: its seat is at Village Neuf, its board brings together nine representatives per country and its advisory council gathers twenty Swiss, fifteen French and fifteen German members. Its working groups cover mobility, spatial planning, civil society and tourism, health and the environment. The Basel agglomeration programme, funded from a Swiss Confederation fund, allows Swiss money to be spent on facilities on the French and German sides: a trinational suburban rail network and a shared road strategy are among the projects under way.

The river acts as both border and link. Between Huningue on the French side and Weil am Rhein on the German side, the Three Countries Bridge spans the Rhine over 238 metres in a single arch, making it the longest pedestrian and cycle bridge of its kind in the world. It is reserved for pedestrians and cyclists: crossing from one country to the other is done on foot, in a few minutes, with no formality beyond the crossing itself. It is the most direct way to grasp what the phrase Three Borders covers.

The Rhine and the Grand Canal d’Alsace are among the great European navigable routes and serve the transit ports of the area, which explains the weight of industry along this stretch of the valley. Alongside that activity, the Petite Camargue Alsacienne protects close to a thousand hectares of Rhine habitats with their wildlife and plants. The two faces of the river can therefore be read within a few kilometres: the commercial waterway on one side, the preserved wetlands on the other.

Mulhouse is a green city. The Alfred Wallach park carries the Jardin remarquable label, and the Steinbach, Salvator and Jaquet parks complete the network of public spaces. The Rebberg district and the Belvédère offer views over the city and the plain. The Rhône to Rhine canal crosses the conurbation and carries several cycle routes. The city claims the Territoire vélo label and provides the Vélocité bike-share stations.

For walking, the Vosges begin a short distance away. The Club Vosgien Mulhouse et Crêtes organises circuits, and the regional train lets you reach starting points such as Thann without a car. The tourist office lists more than three hundred kilometres of cycle routes in the region. Three EuroVelo routes pass through the city, including the Atlantic to Black Sea route and the EV15 following the Rhine, which naturally brings you back to the German border.