Germany Guide
Schleswig-Holstein
The Holstentor
Address: Holstenstr.
Opening time: Jan– March Tues– Sun 11am–5pm; April– Dec daily 10am–6pm
Price: €5
There's no finer introduction to Hanseatic Lübeck than the iconic Holstentor. If city fathers wanted first impressions to count, they must have been thrilled with the imposing structure presented by a municipal architect in the fifteenth century. Its two fat towers, capped by cone-like turrets and joined by an arch with stepped gables, are so impressive as a portrait of solidity the gateway featured on the old 50DM note. Actually the Holstentor leans in all the wrong places like a collapsing sand castle. Despite its wood piles, it gently sagged into the marshy ground beneath during construction from 1466 to 1478 and has been bolstered twice – it was a close call whether it would be demolished entirely in the nineteenth-century revamp. The facade remains one of Lübeck's finest, with trademark rows of black and red bricks beneath the legend "SPQL" within, a vainglorious nod to the Romans' SPQR acronym Senatus Populus Que Romanus ("the senate and people of Rome"). One tower holds a town museum within its three-metre-thick walls – a model of the Altstadt c.1650 outshines every Hansa-era model ship and torture instrument beforehand.
The peaked facades beyond are the warehouses that stored salt from fellow Hanseatic Leaguer Lüneburg during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; cross Holstentorbrücke and you can see where gable-mounted hoists lowered the "white gold" into ships' holds for export to Scandinavia.