A trip with my dog to Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé (Alsace)

This April, I took a trip with my dog to Riquewihr, a small town located along the wine route in Alsace.

If you are traveling along the Alsace wine route with your dog, I would recommend staying in Riquewihr as your base, because many different walking and hiking routes that connect different towns start from there. One of these routes is shown in this post and will take you from Riquewihr to Ribeauvillé via Hunawihr.

Another one goes to Kaysersberg and Château de Schlossberg. That one is highly recommended but quite challenging!

I can also recommend the hotel that I stayed at in Riquewihr, if you are interested you can find my review here.

THE ROUTE

This walk starts at post office in Riquewihr. Next to the post there is a parking lot, so if you are coming by car you can park there.

Instead of spending time in Riquewihr, we directly leave the city on the walking trail towards Ribeauvillé along the vineyards. It is a beautiful route which affords you some beautiful views over various towns such as Zellenberg.

After about 30 minutes, we reach Hunawihr, a very quiet but pretty town. There were virtually no tourists here which was refreshing compared to Ribeauvillé. Hunawihr is actually famous for its storks and we were lucky to see one in the wild just walking around.

There are also some wineries here, so why not see if you can pop in for a tasting to one of them? We didn’t do that here, but we did have a dog friendly wine tasting in St. Hippolyte which I can highly recommend.

From Hunawihr, we continue until Ribeauvillé, which took roughly another 30 minutes. Honestly, I cannot recommend it though. Ribeauvillé was so busy with tourists that I did not enjoy walking my dog there at all. We were just trying to dodge people and other dogs most of the time. It was so packed that I did not even take one single picture there! I basically just wanted to get out of there again. Such a shame. The town looked quite pretty, but just way to full for my liking, especially compared to the other places we stopped at in the region.

For the way back, we picked a slightly different route but still tried to walk through the vineyards as much as possible.

The paths are great for walking your dog. My pup loved sniffing around and running across dirt and sand rather than roads as well as chasing butterflies that we encountered on the way.

After roughly two and a half hours, we got back to Riquewihr, this time entering the town from the other side.

To get back to the post we walked right through the village and had an opportunity to get to know it. Compared to Hunawihr it was still busy, but thankfully a lot more relaxed than Ribeauvillé.

I don’t know if that is always the case, but during our visit it was. If I had to rate the three towns, Hunawihr would come in first, but it was so quiet that I would probably not want to stay there as a base. Riquewihr felt like a good compromise with some restaurants and shops and yet it was not too crazy busy.

I would probably recommend changing this route somewhat and walking to Hunawihr via Zellenberg instead and just Ribeauvillé altogether if you are more after a relaxing walk and not so interested in seeing the city together with tons of tourists.

HOW LONG IT TAKES AND WHO IT’S FOR

Overall we spent around two and a half hours on this walk. If you want to spend more time in Ribeauvillé or do a wine tasting, do allow more time. Though the walk takes you to vineyards, it is never too steep and doable for most people. I think it could even work with a pram if you stick to the trails.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The walk through the vineyards is gorgeous, but I would actually recommend doing only a circular route between Riquewihr and Hunawihr, perhaps including Zellenberg. I found Ribeauville to be far too busy and it was not fun walking my dog there. On the other hand, the walk to and from Hunawihr was gorgeous and tmy pup loved running along the vineyards!