On the Middle Rhine, Bonn is a city that everyone knows for being the capital of West Germany up to 1990. Germany’s current constitution was declared in Bonn in 1949 and many government ministries are still located in the city. Bonn has all the culture of a nation’s capital, not least on its Museum Mile, …
Having long been a centre for trade, culture and learning, the city of Leipzig was where East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution gained traction in the 1980s. The Monday Demonstrations were held at St. Nicholas Church, blooming into a peaceful protest movement that eventually toppled the GDR’s government. Long before then, the composers Johann Sebastian Bach and …
The capital of Franconia is a city that has lived through momentous world events, from the time of the Holy Roman Empire to the 20th century. The Altstadt (Old Town) is still encircled by walls, and is watched by the Kasierburg castle from a promontory on the north side. Nuremberg was an unofficial capital of …
The city of Bielefeld is in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe, a region powered by high-tech manufacturing and where multinational corporations have their headquarters. One company most people will know is Dr. Oetker, which was founded in Bielefeld and has a museum all about the brand. Although Bielefeld isn’t on many tourist maps there’s still plenty to uncover …
The largest city in the Bergisches Land, a hilly region in North Rhine-Westphalia, Wuppertal is a constellation of smaller towns on the high banks of the Wupper River. In the early days of industrialisation the Wupper Valley was a hotbed of nascent industry in a landscape of textile mills and coal mines. The wealth that …
More than 1,200 years in the making, Heilbronn on the Neckar River has a few strings to its bow. The city is Württemberg’s wine capital, and has a wine festival in September that pulls in hundreds of thousands of people. Heilbronn also has the heritage you’d expect from a former Imperial Free City, and this …
At the very centre of the Ruhr Area, Gelsenkirchen is an industrial city just northeast of Essen. Taking off in the 19th century, coalmining boosted Gelsenkirchen’s population by hundreds of thousands, and the old headframes and slagheaps are preserved monuments and major stops on the Ruhr’s Industrial Heritage Trail. Since the mines and coking plants …
Between Essen and Dortmund, Bochum is a city born on the back of the Industrialisation of the Ruhrgeniet at the end of the 19th century. The days of coal mining and steel manufacturing are mostly in the past, as the last big facilities closed down in the 1980s. But the heavy industry heritage lives on …
On the south bank of the Ruhr, Hagen is a city that mixes culture, industrial history and wide open parks. In fact Hagen is the greenest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, which has a lot to do with the hilly local landscape and the two water reservoirs on the Ruhr River. One person who made an …
On the Elbe in the state of Saxony, Dresden is a city of Baroque wonders that have been resurrected since the war. The Wettins were a long line of Electors and Kings who ruled the state and kingdom of Saxony their seat in from Dresden between the 13th and 20th centuries. None of these rulers …