🇩🇪 Germany · Central
Heidelberg is the postcard of German Romanticism made into a town: a reddish ruined castle rising out of the woods, a river reflecting the roofs of the old town, a stone bridge and a university that has been running since 1386, the oldest in Germany. Nineteenth-century poets and painters turned it into a symbol of melancholy beauty, and ever since it has drawn travellers after that mix of history, nature and student life. Unlike almost every German city, Heidelberg came out of the Second World War intact, so what you see is genuine.
The town is compact and a pleasure to walk. From the long pedestrian Hauptstrasse you take the funicular up to the castle, cross the Old Bridge to the far bank of the Neckar and climb to the Philosophenweg, the path that gives you the classic view of Heidelberg. Along the way you come across the Market Square with its Gothic church, the old university faculties and even a curious student prison covered in graffiti from another age. It all fits into one or two days, but it invites you to linger.
This guide walks through Heidelberg with a practical, warm eye: how to get there from Frankfurt or Mannheim, how the funicular to the castle works (and why the castle is deliberately a ruin), which tickets to get, when to avoid the day-tripper crowds and why sleeping a night is worth it. A small town, but one of those that stay with you.
Heidelberg grew in the shadow of its castle as the capital of the Electoral Palatinate, one of the most powerful territories in the Holy Roman Empire, whose prince-electors founded Germany's oldest university here in 1386. The town had its Renaissance heyday and was a centre of Protestantism, until war hit it hard: in 1622 its famous Palatine Library was taken to the Vatican, and between 1689 and 1693 the troops of Louis XIV of France laid waste to both town and castle in the War of the Palatine Succession. The castle was never fully rebuilt, and its ruin became the great icon of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Heidelberg escaped the bombing of the Second World War and was afterwards the headquarters of the US Army in Europe for decades. Today it is a lively university town and one of the most visited places in Germany. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Germany of Romanticism: Heidelberg and its centuries-old university on the banks of the Neckar, with the ruined castle that poets fell in love with; and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the best preserved medieval free imperial city, jewel of the Romantic Road.
Read the history of Central →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Neckar valley has been inhabited since very early times: near Heidelberg, in the village of Mauer, the jaw of the so-called Homo heidelbergensis turned up in 1907, a hominid hundreds of thousands of years old that bears the town's name. Much later, Celts and Romans occupied these banks; the Romans built a fort and a bridge over the Neckar. But the Heidelberg we know is born in the Middle Ages, in the shadow of a castle.
The town is first mentioned in documents around 1196. It grew squeezed between the river and the hill, at the point where the wooded valley opens onto the Rhine plain, a strategic spot for controlling the passage. From the thirteenth century, Heidelberg was the residence of the counts palatine of the Rhine, one of the great dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire.
The decisive leap came in 1356 with the Golden Bull of the emperor Charles IV, the document that set the rules for electing the emperor. The Bull granted the counts palatine the dignity of prince-electors: that is, they joined the select group of seven princes with the right to choose the emperor. The territory they governed from Heidelberg was called the Electoral Palatinate (Kurpfalz), and its capital became one of the most important centres of power in the Empire. That word, 'Palatinate', comes from these princes' palatine office, originally charged with administering the imperial domains.
In 1386, the prince-elector Rupert I founded the University of Heidelberg, the oldest in Germany and one of the first in the Holy Roman Empire. It began with the four classic faculties — theology, law, philosophy and medicine — and turned the town into an intellectual hub drawing scholars from all over Europe. That university character, more than six centuries old, still defines Heidelberg today.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were its golden age. The electors embellished the castle with Renaissance wings of exceptional beauty: the Ottheinrichsbau, commissioned by the elector Otto Henry in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the Friedrichsbau, raised between 1601 and 1607 by Frederick IV, with statues of the ancestors of the Palatine house. The castle stopped being a fortress and became a sumptuous palace, one of the most admired Renaissance ensembles north of the Alps.
Heidelberg was also a bastion of Protestantism. In 1563, under the elector Frederick III, the Heidelberg Catechism was drafted here, one of the fundamental texts of Reformed Calvinism, circulated across Europe. The town became a centre of Reformed thought and a player in the religious tensions that would end in war.
The most brilliant and most fragile moment came with the elector Frederick V, married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the king of England. For her he had the Hortus Palatinus designed around 1610, a fabulous terraced garden beside the castle, the work of the engineer Salomon de Caus, which contemporaries called 'the eighth wonder of the world'. But Frederick V's political ambition undid him: in 1619 he accepted the crown of Bohemia offered to him by the rebel Protestants, defying the emperor. He reigned barely one winter — hence his place in history as the 'Winter King' — before being defeated, and he dragged the Palatinate into the catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War.
The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) hit Heidelberg hard. In 1622, after a two-month siege, General Tilly's Catholic troops took the town. As spoils, they carried off Heidelberg's greatest treasure: the Bibliotheca Palatina, the famous library of manuscripts and books gathered in the Church of the Holy Spirit, considered one of the richest in Europe. It was given to Pope Gregory XV and taken to Rome in 1623, where much of it remains: today it forms part of the Vatican Apostolic Library. It was an enormous cultural loss for the town.
But the worst came at the end of that century. In the War of the Palatine Succession, also called the Nine Years' War (1688-1697), King Louis XIV of France claimed rights over the Palatinate and sent his armies into the region with a deliberate scorched-earth policy. French troops destroyed Heidelberg and its castle on 2 March 1689, burning the town and blowing up part of the towers. And because the castle still had structures standing, the French came back and finished it off with mines on 23 May 1693, leaving it in the ruins we see today.
There were attempts at reconstruction in the eighteenth century, but fate was cruel: in 1764, two lightning strikes hit the wing of the castle being restored and started a fire that undid the work. The elector Charles Theodore, who had already moved his court to Mannheim, read the event almost as a sign and abandoned the idea. The castle remained a majestic ruin on the hill, and the impoverished town rebuilt itself in Baroque style on its medieval foundations: that is why the old town today has that uniform eighteenth-century Baroque beauty.
What had been a military disaster turned, a century later, into Heidelberg's greatest attraction. In the early nineteenth century, the German Romantic movement found in the town and its ruined castle the perfect image of its ideals: the melancholy of passing time, the force of nature reclaiming the stone, nostalgia for a medieval past in a Germany still split into dozens of states. The ruin, covered in ivy and open to the sky, said more to the Romantics than any intact palace.
Heidelberg became the cradle of a literary circle, the so-called Heidelberg Romanticism (Heidelberger Romantik). Between 1805 and 1808, the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published here 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' ('The Boy's Magic Horn'), a famous collection of German folk songs and poems that shaped the country's culture. Painters such as Carl Philipp Fohr and poets such as Joseph von Eichendorff and Friedrich Hölderlin sang the beauty of the valley and the castle. The town became a byword for German Romanticism and for a certain sentimental idea of Germany.
One figure was key to saving the ruin: the French nobleman Charles de Graimberg, who from 1810 installed himself as the castle's volunteer guardian, drew and engraved it again and again to spread its image, and stopped local people using its stones as a quarry. Thanks to him, the ruin was preserved instead of disappearing. In 1890, a commission of experts concluded that rebuilding the castle completely was impossible and decided to preserve the ruin, restoring only the Friedrichsbau. That decision consecrated Heidelberg forever as the romantic ruin par excellence.
Tourism came soon. The American writer Mark Twain devoted enthusiastic pages to Heidelberg in 'A Tramp Abroad' (1880), and the town became famous in the English-speaking world. The operetta 'The Student Prince', set in Heidelberg's university taverns, made it more popular still. The town, saved from reconstruction, lived off its romantic legend.
Heidelberg was not spared the darkest part of the twentieth century. The university, the town's pride, let itself be Nazified after 1933: Jewish and dissident professors were expelled, books were burned and a slogan matching the regime's ideology was even carved on the pediment of the New University. The town's Jewish community was persecuted and deported; in 1940, hundreds of Jews from Heidelberg and the region were sent to the Gurs internment camp in France, the antechamber to extermination. These events are remembered today soberly on plaques and memorials.
Unlike almost every German city, however, Heidelberg came out of the Second World War physically intact. It was not systematically bombed: it was not an industrial centre nor a significant rail hub, so it was not a priority military target. There is a popular idea that the Allies spared it to use it later as a barracks, but historians point out that the main reason was simply its slight strategic value. On 30 March 1945, American troops entered the town, which surrendered with barely any resistance; the Germans had blown up the bridges over the Neckar, including part of the Old Bridge, which was later rebuilt.
Being intact and in the American occupation zone, Heidelberg became for decades the headquarters of the United States Army in Europe (USAREUR), based above all in the old barracks renamed Campbell Barracks. Thousands of American soldiers and their families lived here during the Cold War, until the command withdrew in the 2010s. The American presence left a particular mark on the life of the town.
The university, reopened in 1945 under anti-Nazi professors such as Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, recovered its prestige and became once again one of the most important in Europe, with several Nobel laureates among its members. Today Heidelberg is a vibrant university town, an important scientific and medical hub, and one of the most visited destinations in Germany. Its genuine old town, its romantic castle and its river keep drawing travellers from all over the world in search of the Germany of the storybooks, the one the war, miraculously, did not erase.