Chalampé

Chalampé is a commune in the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace in north-eastern France, on the river Rhine, facing Neuenburg am Rhein in Germany across the border. The site belonged first to Neuenburg and, because the Rhine kept changing course, fell sometimes within the jurisdiction of Neuenburg and sometimes within that of Bantzenheim, until the nineteenth-century correction of the Upper Rhine begun by the engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla fixed the frontier. In 1709, during the War of the Spanish Succession, French troops under Marshal du Bourg attacked and beat an imperial army led by Field Marshal Mercy near a farm called Gestifshof in an oak forest owned by Neuenburg. Some families who had followed the French army settled on the cleared ground, and a hamlet called Eichwald, meaning oak forest, formed there; it took the name Chalampé only in 1735. On 1 September 1870 the place saw the affair of Chalampé-sur-le-Rhin in the Franco-German war. In 2023 the commune counted 996 inhabitants. Local sport includes the Chalampé golf course and rugby and basketball clubs.