Alsfeld, Germany: a half-timbered jewel of Hesse on the German Fairy Tale Road

At the heart of Alsfeld stands one of the most photographed town halls in Germany, a slender half-timbered building of 1512-16 with twin pointed turrets rising over the market square. Around it gather more than four hundred timber-framed houses, so complete a medieval ensemble that in 1975 the Council of Europe named the town a model for the conservation of historic buildings. A town of around 16,000 people in central Hesse, Alsfeld sits about 100 kilometres north of Frankfurt and roughly 35 kilometres east of Marburg, in the gentle Vogelsberg uplands.

The streets curve to follow the line of the vanished town wall, opening onto squares framed by the Renaissance Weinhaus of 1538 and the late-Gothic Walpurgiskirche. Wealth from the medieval cloth trade paid for it all, and the quiet that followed the Thirty Years' War left the old town largely untouched into modern times.

Little Red Riding Hood country

Alsfeld sits in the Schwalm region, where countrywomen once wore a small red cap with their traditional dress - the costume said to have inspired the Brothers Grimm's Little Red Riding Hood. The town is a stop on the German Fairy Tale Road, and a Fairy Tale House brings the Grimm stories to life with themed rooms and live storytelling.

A storybook townscape

Spared serious damage in the Second World War, Alsfeld keeps an unusually honest medieval face: leaning facades, carved beams and crooked lanes that have drawn film crews and fairy-tale fans alike. Markets and festivals fill the square through the year, from the Whitsun fair to a glowing Christmas market beneath the old town hall.