Bad Wimpfen, Germany: an imperial Hohenstaufen town above the Neckar

From the valley floor the silhouette is unmistakable: two great keeps, the Blue Tower and the Red Tower, rising over a ridge of half-timbered houses high above the Neckar. They are the surviving towers of the largest imperial palace the Hohenstaufen emperors ever raised north of the Alps. A spa town of about 7,500 people in Baden-Württemberg, Bad Wimpfen stands on the river some 15 kilometres north of Heilbronn, roughly 40 kilometres east of Heidelberg and about 50 kilometres north of Stuttgart, along the Castle Road.

Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is first documented here in 1182, the date taken as the founding of the imperial palace, the Kaiserpfalz. Its arcaded great hall, palace chapel and the Blue Tower of around 1200 still stand; from the top of that tower watchmen kept what may be the longest continuous lookout tradition in Germany, manned into the nineteenth century.

Two towns, one history

Bad Wimpfen grew in two parts - Wimpfen am Berg on the hill, with its tangle of timbered lanes, and Wimpfen im Tal below, partly resting on the walls of a Roman fort. After the decline of the Hohenstaufen it became a Free Imperial City, and in 1622 one of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years' War was fought close by. A small tower beside the Red Tower, the Nürnberger Türmchen, was raised in gratitude to Nuremberg for its help in rebuilding the walls after that war.

Spa waters and timber lanes

The "Bad" in the name arrived in 1930, when the town's salt springs turned it into a spa; Mark Twain had already noted the place on his travels decades earlier. Around sixty protected historic houses fill the old town, among them some of the finest Franconian and Alemannic timber framing in the region, best enjoyed on a slow climb toward the towers and their views over the Neckar valley.