Les forts et le musée de Colmars-les-Alpes

Colmars, a Vauban town

• The first fortifications date back to 1382, after the neighbouring village of Allos was annexed to the Duchy of Savoy, turning Colmars into a border town.
• In 1692, after the Duke of Savoy joined the League of Augsburg, Louis XIV entrusted Vauban with revising Colmars' defensive system.
• Vauban did not oversee the work himself: he delegated it to the architect Antoine Niquet (who restored the medieval walls and added five bastioned towers) and the engineer Guy Creuzet de Richerand.
• Coming to inspect the work in October 1700, Vauban criticised what had been built (the walls were judged too low and too thin) and put forward new plans, which came to nothing after his death in 1707. The Fort de Savoie was therefore built to a design different from Vauban's own project — it is a fort of the Vauban system, not one he designed himself.
• The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) pushed the border further away and cost Colmars its strategic role. The town is today a member of the Réseau des sites majeurs de Vauban (Network of Major Vauban Sites).

The Fort de Savoie

• On the Saint-Martin hill, upstream (to the north) of the town, it faced the former border with the Duchy of Savoy.
• Built between 1693 and 1696 to the plans of Guy Creuzet de Richerand: a bastioned structure of about 50 m by 25 m, trapezoidal in shape, listed as a Historic Monument since 1923.
• Here you'll find a guardhouse, a drawbridge, a powder magazine, a covered way, a round tower and a pentagonal tower; the round tower's timber frame is made of larch, a tree species common in the Haut-Verdon.
• The permanent exhibition “Histoire(s) d'un fort” traces the border with Savoy and the fort's architecture through models and a staged exhibition design, guided by a character: Claude Du Puy, a captain who arrived in 1693 at the head of a company sent to build the forts.
• In the guardhouse, the immersive screening “Le récit de Vauban” (about twenty minutes long) brings the building of the forts back to life. The fort also hosts concerts, theatre and temporary exhibitions.

The Maison Musée and the rampart walk

• Set within the fortified village, the Maison Musée du Haut-Verdon is a museum of art and traditions of the upper Verdon valley, housed in a bourgeois house from the late 17th century.
• It brings together a collection of around 10,000 objects, from the late 14th to the second half of the 20th century: religious art, the early days of tourism in the Haut-Verdon, a schoolroom of days gone by, and a reconstructed bourgeois interior from the early 20th century.
• The rampart walk (about 500 m) links ten exhibition towers: the west wing devoted to military history, the east wing to traditional trades and living heritage.
• An apothecary's garden, dedicated to the local apothecary Jean Saurin, displays medicinal plants. The whole complex (museum, rampart walk, Fort de Savoie) has been run since 2003 by the Association Maison Musée et Forts Vauban du Haut-Verdon (Haut-Verdon Maison Musée and Vauban Forts Association).

The Fort de France and the ramparts

• Downstream (to the south) of the town, the Fort de France watched over the entrance to Colmars on the Kingdom of France side; it's also called the Fort du Calvaire (and, later, Fort Soult). It's a compact redoubt on a square plan, also built around 1693-1696.
• It isn't normally open for unguided visits: you can walk around the outside along a loopholed caponier, and occasional guided tours are sometimes organised.
• The town has kept its ring of ramparts and its gates: the Porte de France (France Gate) to the south, and the Porte de Savoie (Savoy Gate), also known as the Porte de l'Eau (Water Gate), to the north.
• This silhouette of a town entirely enclosed by walls, guarded by two forts, makes Colmars one of the rare Vauban-style fortified complexes in the Southern Alps.

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