Germany Guide
Baden-Württemberg
Heidelberg
Nestled in a wooded gorge of the River Neckar, the university town of HEIDELBERG boasts a roster of sights that publicists of larger rivals would pay handsomely for. Goethe waxed lyrical about its ideal beauty, looks which so bewitched Turner that he captured it for posterity, and even Benjamin Disraeli fell for its "exceeding loveliness". "Here," he sighed, "the romantic ruggedness of the German landscape unites in perfect harmony with the delicate beauty of Italy." So effective was this PR, that today three million tourists a year are enticed to it, and for many Heidelberg remains the must-see of the Grand European Tour that it was for the nineteenth-century Romantics.
Ironically, they had stumbled upon a town down on its luck. French troops ravaged Heidelberg during the War of the Palatinate Succession in 1688 and Louis XIV returned five years later to deliver a blow of such force that writer Nicolas Boileau suggested Jean-Baptiste Racine inform the Académie Française "Heidelberger deleta". To cap its tale of woe, Palatinate elector Charles Philip left in favour of Mannheim after the Protestant stronghold refused to embrace Catholicism, in doing so demoting ravaged Heidelberg to just another provincial town.