Germany’s Romantic Road
Through landscapes of sparkling lakes and thick forest dotted with medieval villages and fairytale castles runs one of Europe’s best-loved touring routes, known rather fittingly as the Romantic Road. Now considered the granddaddy of Germany’s scenic routes, this 400-kilometre ‘road’ has attracted those with an interest in art, history and nature to drive along it since it first opened to tourists in the 1950s. At that time it was popular with holidaying American soldiers, who were keen to show their families a very different and undeniably beautiful side to the country with whom they had been at war just a few years earlier. And the Romantische Strasse, to use its German name, did just that.
Sixty years on, this travel brochure view of Germany draws visitors from all over the world, and is especially popular among Japanese sightseers. The route’s charms are obvious as you make your way through the picturesque landscape along the river Main and down through Franconian wine country to the Alps, passing medieval walled towns with guard towers and delightful old Rathauses en route.
Indeed, it was in the Middle Ages that this ancient trading route became firmly established, although parts of it date back as far as Roman times. Much of the trade passed through Augsburg, the home of the prominent Fugger family of bankers, on its way to cities such as Rothenburg ob Tauber (meaning ‘Red fortress above the Tauber’ river) and other centres of the Holy Roman Empire. Medieval Rothenburg was a source of inspiration for the Romantic painter, Carl Spitzweg, and with its cobbled squares and distinctive half-timbered fachwerk houses is now one of the most popular stop-offs on the Romantic Road,. Spitzweg wasn’t the only artist to make his mark on this area, however. Others, including Balthasar Neumann, the Baroque architect who designed the 400-room Würzburg Residenz palace, and Tilman Riemenschneider, a master sculptor and woodcarver, whose late Gothic work can be seen across the Tauber Valley, also played their part.
Around the halfway mark on the road is another chocolate box town, Nördlingen, which lies within the Ries, a 25-kilometre-wide crater that formed when a meteor crashed 15 million years ago. This is the closest section of the road to Ingolstadt Village, and makes a scenic day trip for shoppers at the Village. From here, the northern half of the route also provides an enjoyable way of combining a shopping trip to Wertheim Village, just to the west of Würzburg, the official starting point of the road.
Heading south from Nördlingen, the road carries on to Bavaria’s highest town, Füssen, a late-medieval settlement that the prince bishops of Augsburg used as their summer residence. This last stretch of the Romantic Road, as it passes Munich to the west, is also one of the best known, thanks to the alpine scenery and fantastical nineteenth-century castles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. The former, a silhouette of turrets built by the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria as an ode to chivalry and in homage to Richard Wagner, was the inspiration for Disney’s Snow White Castle and provides a truly fairytale ending to the route. What could be more romantic?
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14-06-2011
