Bas-Rhin is a département of Grand Est region in France. The name means “Lower Rhine”.
Geography
To the north of Bas-Rhin lies the Palatinate forest (Pfälzerwald) in the German Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Land of Baden-Württemberg lies to the east. To the south lies Haut-Rhin, the town of Colmar and southern Alsace, and to the west the département of Moselle in Lorraine.
Bas-Rhin is one of the original 83 départements created on 4 March 1790, during the French Revolution.
In the mid-1790s, following the French occupation of the entire left bank of the Rhine, the northern boundary of the département was extended north beyond the Lauter to the Queich river to include the areas of Annweiler am Trifels, Landau in der Pfalz, Bad Bergzabern, and Wörth am Rhein. However, upon Napoleon’s second defeat in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reassigned the areas north of the Lauter to Bavaria; and those territories are now presently located in the neighbouring German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The département has twice been incorporated into Germany: from 1871 (after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War) until the end of World War I in 1918, and again briefly during World War II (from 1940 to 1945).
Useful information:
Tourism office in Alsace:
www.tourism-alsace.com
Maps of Alsace:
www.ign.fr
www.viamichelin.com
Gites in Alsace:
www.1000gites.com
Travel from the UK
By air: Regular flights by most major international airlines serve Alsace’s two international airports: Strasbourg International Airport (located 9 miles south-west of Strasbourg) and Basel-Mulhouse-Fribourg Euro Airport (located in Southern Alsace).
Easyjet flies from Liverpool and London (Stansted and Luton airports) to Basel-Mulhouse-Fribourg Euro Airport.
www.easyjet.com
www.britishairways.com
By train: Main-line trains from the rest of Europe serve Alsace directly.
Our team of sale advisers at Sextant Properties will be happy to help you to find a property in Alsace. We have a large network of partners in Alsace. All of them are registered French real estate agents and speak both French and English. Whatever kind of property you are looking for: farmhouse, longere, barn, gite, B&B, country house, mill, castle or chateau, we will do our best to find a property in Alsace matching your requirements.