Görlitz, Germany: the "Görliwood" film city on the Polish border

Film crews call it Görliwood. More than a hundred productions - among them The Grand Budapest Hotel, Inglourious Basterds and Valkyrie - have used Görlitz as a stand-in for Paris, Berlin or pre-war Budapest, drawn by an old town that came through the twentieth century almost untouched. In 2017 a European network of film commissions named it the best filming location of the decade.

Germany's easternmost town sits in Upper Lusatia, in eastern Saxony, on the Lusatian Neisse. The river is also the national border: the eastern half of the old city became the Polish town of Zgorzelec in 1945, and today a pedestrian bridge, the Altstadtbrücke, links the two across an open Schengen frontier.

Six centuries spared by war

Because Allied bombers of the Second World War rarely reached this far east, Görlitz kept a near-complete record of European architecture: Gothic merchants' houses, ornate Renaissance portals, baroque facades and a remarkable belt of Art Nouveau apartment blocks. With several thousand listed monuments, the town grew wealthy on the medieval Via Regia trade route and on cloth and linen weaving as a member of the Upper Lusatian league of six towns. The late-Gothic Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, with its twin spires and its baroque "Sun Organ", overlooks the Neisse, while the early-Renaissance Schönhof houses the Silesian Museum.

One foot in two countries

The Untermarkt and Obermarkt squares anchor a compact centre meant for walking, and the town hall tower will be familiar to anyone who has seen Tarantino's wartime film. Görlitz stands about 100 kilometres east of Dresden, with a direct regional rail line, and the walk across the bridge into Poland takes only minutes. Quieter than better-known German cities, it rewards visitors who linger over its cafe-lined squares.