Thuringia

Eisenach lies at the north-western end of the Thuringian Forest, and on a wooded hill above the town stands the Wartburg, a castle founded in the 11th century, restored in the 19th and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its Romanesque Palas, the hall of the landgraves of Thuringia, holds the Hall of the Singers, linked by legend with the minstrels' contest that Wagner set in Tannhäuser, a bower lined with glass mosaics of the life of Saint Elisabeth, who lived at the castle as a landgrave's wife, and a banqueting hall painted in the 19th century. In the Vogtei, the bailiff's lodging, is the panelled room where Martin Luther, hidden in the castle in 1521–22, translated the New Testament into German. Down in the town, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 and baptised in the Georgenkirche on the market square; the Bach House on the Frauenplan is a museum of his life and music, and the half-timbered Luther House nearby is where, by tradition, Luther lodged as a schoolboy.

North-east of Eisenach, the Hainich is a long, low ridge of limestone under an unbroken forest of beech. Its southern part is a national park, where the trees are left to grow old and fall, and part of the World Heritage listing of Europe's ancient beech forests. In April and May, before the leaves close overhead, the forest floor is covered with wild garlic and wood anemones. Near Bad Langensalza, at the Thiemsburg, a treetop walkway leads through the crowns of the beeches to a lookout tower above the forest. Mühlhausen, on the Unstrut near the Hainich, keeps much of its medieval town wall and a skyline of Gothic church towers, and the young Bach was organist for a year at its church of Divi Blasii.

Gotha, between Eisenach and Erfurt, lies below Friedenstein, a vast early baroque palace of three wings and two corner towers that the dukes of Saxe-Gotha began in the 1640s. Its state rooms and the dukes' collections are shown as a museum, and one of its towers holds a baroque court theatre. A landscape park spreads around the palace, and from the palace hill the Wasserkunst, a chain of fountains and cascades, steps down to the Hauptmarkt, where the Renaissance town hall stands in the middle of the square.

Between Gotha and Arnstadt, three castles on three neighbouring hills, known together as the Drei Gleichen, rise above the farmland beside the A4 motorway: the Mühlburg and Burg Gleichen are ruins, and the Wachsenburg still stands roofed. Arnstadt, on the Gera at the northern foot of the Thuringian Forest, is where Bach, at 18, took his first post as an organist in 1703, and the church where he played is now called the Bach Church after him.

Erfurt, the state capital, lies in the Thuringian Basin on the Gera, a merchant town of the Middle Ages whose old town has kept its churches, bridges and lanes. Its cathedral hill, the Krämerbrücke and the old town fill two days of their own.

Weimar, on the Ilm a quarter of an hour east of Erfurt by train, was the home of Goethe and Schiller around 1800 and the town where the Bauhaus was founded in 1919. Its poets' houses, parks and Bauhaus sites, two World Heritage Sites between them, fill two days.

Jena lies in the Saale valley between steep limestone slopes, a university town known for the optics industry that grew from Carl Zeiss's workshop, about half an hour from Erfurt by train. Its old town, planetarium and hillside paths fill a day.

Downstream from Jena, the three Dornburg palaces — one medieval, one Renaissance, one rococo — stand in a row on a clifftop above the Saale, with terraced gardens looking out over the valley. Upstream, the Leuchtenburg crowns a hill above Kahla, and the valley leads on to Rudolstadt, where the Heidecksburg, the baroque palace of the princes of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, stands above the town; its rococo state rooms are shown as a museum. At Saalfeld, a few kilometres further up the river, the Feengrotten are the galleries of an old alum-slate mine, their walls and dripstones coloured by minerals in shades of ochre, green and blue, and are seen on a guided tour.

South-west of Erfurt, the Thuringian Forest rises in a long, wooded ridge, with the Großer Beerberg as its highest summit and small resorts such as Friedrichroda, Bad Tabarz and Bad Liebenstein around its edges. Along its crest runs the Rennsteig, an old ridge path of about 169 kilometres from Hörschel on the Werra, near Eisenach, to Blankenstein on the Saale, across the Thuringian Forest and the Slate Mountains and along the edge of the Franconian Forest. High on the ridge, Oberhof is the region's winter-sports resort: its biathlon stadium and its luge and bobsleigh track hold international races in winter, and cross-country ski trails lead out along the Rennsteig.

Beyond the forest to the south-west, Meiningen lies in the Werra valley, the former seat of the dukes of Saxe-Meiningen, whose theatre still stages drama, opera and concerts and whose palace, Elisabethenburg, holds the town's museums. Schmalkalden, at the forest's south-western edge, is an old town of half-timbered houses below the Renaissance palace of Wilhelmsburg.

In the north of the state, the Kyffhäuser is a short, wooded range of hills above the Goldene Aue, a broad and fertile plain. On its crest, among the ruins of a medieval imperial castle, stands the Kyffhäuser Monument, a massive stone tower of the 1890s with a figure of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa carved below it, and its terraces look out over the plain to the Harz.

Altenburg, in the far east of the state and within easy reach of Leipzig by train, is the town where the card game Skat was devised in the early 19th century, remembered by the Skat Fountain in the old town. Its palace looks down from a hill over the streets, and the Red Spires, the two red-brick towers of a medieval monastery church, rise over the roofs.