Hessen

Frankfurt lies on the Main in the south of the state: Germany's banking city and the seat of the European Central Bank, with the tallest towers in the country. Its old town, museums and riverbanks fill a day or two of their own.

Wiesbaden, the state capital, lies on the Rhine opposite Mainz and has been a spa since Roman times, with twenty-six warm springs rising beneath it. The spa quarter centres on the Kurhaus, which faces a long lawn, the Bowling Green, between two colonnades; on the Kochbrunnenplatz nearby, hot, salty water steams from the fountain of the Kochbrunnen. From the Wilhelmstraße, the boulevard locals call the “Rue”, the streets lead to the Schlossplatz, where the red-brick Marktkirche raises five towers on the same square as the palace of the state parliament. Above the town, the Neroberg has a vineyard on its slope and the gilded domes of a Russian Orthodox church in its woods.

Below Wiesbaden the Rhine runs west to Rüdesheim, and on its north bank the Rheingau rises in south-facing Riesling vineyards. Eltville has the tower of the archbishops' castle and rose gardens beside the river. In a wooded side valley near Eltville, Eberbach Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded in the 12th century, keeps its Romanesque church and the cellars where the monks made wine, and its halls served for the interior scenes of the film “The Name of the Rose”. Towards the western end, Rüdesheim packs its wine taverns into the narrow Drosselgasse, and in the warmer months a cable car rises over the vineyards to the Niederwald, where a huge statue of Germania looks out over the river to Bingen. Below Rüdesheim the valley narrows into the castle gorge of the Rhine.

North of Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, the Taunus rises in long wooded ridges, and from the Großer Feldberg, its highest summit, the towers of Frankfurt stand out on the plain below. Along its southern foot, the broad ruin of a castle crowns the hill above Königstein. Bad Homburg, reached from Frankfurt by S-Bahn, is a spa town whose park holds mineral springs, a Thai pavilion and a Russian chapel, with the landgraves' palace and its White Tower nearby. On the ridge above it, the Saalburg, a Roman fort on the Limes, the frontier of the empire and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was rebuilt around 1900 as a museum, and the frontier's bank and ditch can be followed through the woods. Near Neu-Anspach, Hessenpark is an open-air museum of farmhouses and village buildings brought from across Hessen.

Darmstadt, south of Frankfurt, is a university and science city, and its best-known sight is the Mathildenhöhe, an artists' colony founded around 1900 by the last grand duke and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Art Nouveau houses and studios around the Wedding Tower, whose roof rises in five rounded fingers, beside the golden domes of a Russian chapel. Near the city, the Messel pit is a World Heritage Site of its own for its fossils, among them tiny early horses; a visitor centre and a viewing platform stand at its rim, and the pit itself is entered only with a guide.

South of Darmstadt, the Bergstraße runs along the western edge of the Odenwald towards Heidelberg, past orchards, vineyards and wine towns that face the Rhine plain. Bensheim and Heppenheim are its wine towns, and Heppenheim's market square is ringed by half-timbered houses below the hilltop castle of Starkenburg. In the plain west of Bensheim, Lorsch Abbey, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, keeps its King's Hall, a Carolingian gatehouse faced in red and white stone. Behind the Bergstraße, the Odenwald is a wooded upland: near Reichenbach, the Felsenmeer spills a stream of boulders down a hillside, among them a half-finished column left by Roman masons, and Michelstadt has a half-timbered town hall raised on wooden posts on its market square.

North of the Taunus, the Lahn winds through central Hessen towards the Rhine, a quiet river paddled by canoe in summer. At the western edge of the state, the seven towers of Limburg Cathedral, brightly painted, rise on a rock above the river and an old town of half-timbered houses. Upstream, Wetzlar is the home of the Leica camera and of a cathedral left unfinished, its Romanesque and Gothic towers side by side. Here the young Goethe fell for Charlotte Buff, whose family house, the Lottehaus, stands in the old town, and wrote her into “The Sorrows of Young Werther”.

Marburg, further up the Lahn, climbs a steep hill above the river, and its university, founded in 1527, fills the town with students. At the foot of the hill, the Elisabethkirche, begun in 1235, is one of the first Gothic churches in Germany, built over the grave of Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia, who ran a hospital in the town; her golden shrine stands in the sacristy. Lanes and stairways climb through the upper town to the market square and its town hall, and public lifts carry walkers up from the lower town. At the top, the castle of the landgraves, where Luther and Zwingli met in 1529, looks out over the roofs and the valley.

East of Giessen, the Vogelsberg rises in a broad dome of basalt, the remains of an old volcanic field, with beech woods and high pastures, and the Hoherodskopf near its centre is the place for walks and wide views. At the foot of the Vogelsberg, Alsfeld keeps an old town of half-timbered houses, with its town hall of the early 16th century standing above a stone arcade on the market square.

Fulda is a baroque town: the domed cathedral, with the tomb of Saint Boniface in its crypt, and the palace of the prince-abbots, with its garden and orangery, lie a few minutes apart. East of the town, the Rhön, a UNESCO biosphere reserve shared with Bavaria and Thuringia, is an upland of open pastures and long views, known as the “land of open distances”. Its highest summit, the Wasserkuppe, at 950 metres the highest mountain in Hessen, is where gliding grew up in the 1920s, and gliders and paragliders still launch from its slopes. With few town lights around it, the Rhön is a dark-sky reserve.

Kassel, the main city of the north, lies on the river Fulda, and its great sight is the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe on its western edge, a hillside park that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At the top, a copper statue of Hercules stands on a pyramid above a giant octagon, and from its foot a cascade runs straight down the hill towards Wilhelmshöhe Palace. In the summer season, on set afternoons, water released at the top is followed down through the park for over an hour, over the cascades, a waterfall and an aqueduct, to the Great Fountain, whose jet rises about 50 metres. The palace holds a gallery of old masters with a group of paintings by Rembrandt. The brothers Grimm, born in Hanau, lived in Kassel while they collected their fairy tales, and every five years documenta, an exhibition of contemporary art, fills the city's museums and squares for a summer.

South-west of Kassel, Fritzlar keeps much of its town wall around a market square of half-timbered houses, and its Romanesque cathedral, St Peter's, stands on the site of the church Saint Boniface founded here. West of it, the Edersee, a long reservoir winding between wooded hills below Waldeck Castle, is the north's lake for swimming and sailing in summer. Along its shore, the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park protects old beech forest, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site of Europe's ancient beech woods.