Bacharach, Germany: a Rhine wine town at the heart of Romantic Rhine country

When Victor Hugo passed through in 1842 he judged Bacharach one of the prettiest towns he had ever seen, and generations of poets and painters - Heine, Brentano and Turner among them - felt the same pull. This small wine town on the left bank of the Rhine, with only about 2,000 inhabitants, is often called the secret heart of Rhine Romanticism. It lies in Rhineland-Palatinate within the Rhine Gorge, roughly 50 kilometres south of Koblenz and about 90 kilometres west of Frankfurt, whose airport is the usual gateway for visitors.

First recorded in the early eleventh century, Bacharach grew rich shipping wine along one of Europe's great waterways, though it received formal town rights only as late as 1936. A ring of medieval walls and gate towers, finished around 1400, still partly encircles the centre, and the Steeger Tor and the wall walk lead up toward the vineyards.

The town beneath the crag

High above stands Burg Stahleck, a twelfth-century castle on a rocky spur whose name means roughly "impregnable castle on a crag", with a commanding view toward the Lorelei. Damaged in the seventeenth-century wars and rebuilt in the early twentieth century, it now serves as a youth hostel. Below it the Gothic ruin of the Wernerkapelle hangs above the rooftops, and the Romanesque-Gothic Peterskirche anchors the lower town.

Half-timbered gems and Riesling

Among Bacharach's timber houses, the Altes Haus of 1586 in the Oberstraße ranks among the best known on the whole Rhine, its leaning wine-red frame hung with green shutters. The surrounding slate slopes still produce the Riesling that made the town's name, and since 2002 Bacharach has formed part of the UNESCO-listed Upper Middle Rhine Valley, the 65-kilometre stretch of castles and vineyards between Bingen and Koblenz.