Heidelberg, Germany: castle ruins, an ancient university and the cradle of Romanticism

No German view has been painted, sketched and praised more often than Heidelberg's: the rose-red ruins of the castle on their wooded slope, the old stone bridge arching the Neckar, and the spires of the old town crowded in the valley below. Turner painted it again and again, Mark Twain devoted pages to it, and the Romantic poets made it their own. A lively city of around 160,000 people in Baden-Württemberg - a quarter of them students - Heidelberg stands on the Neckar where it leaves the Odenwald hills, about 20 kilometres east of Mannheim and roughly 80 kilometres south of Frankfurt.

The castle, a red sandstone palace ranked among the finest Renaissance buildings north of the Alps, rises some eighty metres above the rooftops. French armies wrecked it in 1689 and 1693 and lightning finished the work in 1764, leaving the romantic ruin that draws millions today, complete with the colossal eighteenth-century wine barrel known as the Great Tun.

Germany's oldest university

Founded in 1386, the University of Heidelberg is the oldest in the country, and its presence has shaped the town for more than six centuries; the old university, the student jail and the libraries lie among the lanes of the Altstadt. Heidelberg was long the capital of the Electoral Palatinate, until the court moved to Mannheim in 1720 and, as the elector reportedly wished, grass grew in its streets.

Bridges and a philosophers' path

The Old Bridge of 1788, guarded by its twin-towered gate and a curious bronze monkey, leads across the Neckar to the Philosophers' Walk, the hillside path where generations of professors strolled for the view back over the castle and the river. Largely spared in the Second World War, the Baroque old town below remains one of the most walkable and atmospheric in Germany.