Monschau, Germany: the half-timbered "Pearl of the Eifel" in the Rur valley

Squeezed into a narrow bend of the Rur river, where wooded slopes of the Eifel rise steeply on either side, Monschau looks as though it has been stacked there over the centuries. Crooked half-timbered houses lean toward the water, slate roofs jostle for room, and flower-hung bridges cross the stream - a scene that has earned the little North Rhine-Westphalian town its nickname, the "Pearl of the Eifel".

More than 300 of its buildings are protected monuments, and the historic core has stayed almost unchanged for some three centuries. The town lies barely two kilometres from the Belgian border and about a 30-minute drive south of Aachen, within the Hohes Venn–Eifel Nature Park.

A town the railway forgot

First mentioned in 1198 as Montjoie - the present name dates only from 1918 - Monschau grew up beneath a hilltop castle that became the seat of the Dukes of Jülich from 1433 and was stormed by Emperor Charles V in 1543. In the eighteenth century the town flourished on fine woollen cloth prized across Europe, and the grandeur of that era survives in the Rotes Haus, a red-painted patrician mansion completed around 1768 for the cloth merchant Johann Heinrich Scheibler and now a museum of furnished interiors. Because no nineteenth-century railway ever reached the valley, there was no pressure to tear down and rebuild, and the medieval streetscape endured.

Castle, cloth and mustard

Burg Monschau on its ridge gives the finest view over the rooftops and hosts open-air classical concerts in summer. In the lanes below, the Senfmühle has milled mustard by traditional stone methods since 1882, with more than twenty varieties to taste, and the Protestant Stadtkirche anchors the market square. Hiking routes such as the Eifelsteig begin at the town's edge, and the Christmas market each December draws crowds into the glowing timber streets.