The Schwendi Fountain stands at the heart of Colmar's old town, where a canal-side square is ringed by painted half-timbered houses. The figure at its centre, cast in iron in 1898, raises not a sword but a bunch of grapes, which tells you something about the sculptor's priorities.

The sculptor was Auguste Bartholdi, who had finished the Statue of Liberty just over a decade earlier. The subject is Lazarus von Schwendi, a 16th-century Swabian general who defeated Ottoman forces in Hungary in 1565. Legend credits him with bringing Tokay grape varieties back to Alsace. The legend is almost certainly false, but Bartholdi liked it anyway.

When the fountain was repaired after World War II, someone quietly turned Schwendi around. He now faces the Koifhus, Colmar's medieval customs house. VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace these layers of civic mythology, connecting Bartholdi's Colmar works to his broader career and the legends that local monuments quietly encode.