Welcome to Heidelberg and the Neckar Valley
Heidelberg is home to Germany's oldest university, founded in 1386, and it still feels like a university town in the most genuine sense — a large student population, centuries of academic tradition and a compact old town built as much around lecture halls and student taverns as around churches and markets. Mark Twain spent part of a summer here in the 1870s and wrote about the town at length in 'A Tramp Abroad', helping cement its reputation among English-speaking travellers.
What makes Heidelberg unusual among Germany's historic cities is that its old town was largely spared the Allied bombing that flattened most of urban Germany in the Second World War — the city held little strategic value and, by some accounts, was deliberately left as a hospital town. The result is a baroque townscape that is authentically old rather than convincingly rebuilt, a real rarity after visiting cities like Dresden or Nuremberg.
Above the old town, the ruined Heidelberg Castle has stood in various states of decay since being damaged by war and lightning in the 17th and 18th centuries, and was deliberately never fully restored — its romantic, half-ruined silhouette is precisely what drew 19th-century Romantic poets and painters here in the first place. The wider Neckar Valley continues the theme upstream, its steep banks lined with still more castles between Heidelberg and Heilbronn.
- Historic Site
- Romantic
- Riverside
