The Musée Unterlinden occupies a Dominican monastery that has stood at the heart of Colmar since the 1200s. It is one of Alsace's most important museums, but its star attraction is something altogether unsettling: the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald in the early 16th century.

Few works of art prepare you for it. The altarpiece was made for a hospital that treated patients with skin diseases, and its depiction of Christ's suffering was meant to offer them comfort. That history gives the painting an intensity that reproductions simply don't convey.

The museum expanded into Colmar's former municipal baths, a grand 1906 building connected to the monastery by an underground tunnel. Upstairs and down, the collection spans the Stone Age to the present day.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the Unterlinden as an anchor point for Colmar's layered story, tracing the monastery's Dominican origins and connecting the museum's collection to the painters, sculptors and turbulent history of this many-times-contested Alsatian city.