Dinkelsbühl, Germany: a perfectly walled medieval town on the Romantic Road

Legend has it that in 1632, as Swedish troops prepared to storm Dinkelsbühl during the Thirty Years' War, the town's children went out to plead for mercy and so saved their homes from destruction. Whether or not it happened quite that way, the tale is re-enacted every July in the Kinderzeche festival - and the town those children supposedly spared still stands almost untouched. A Franconian town of about 11,500 people in Bavaria, Dinkelsbühl lies in the Wörnitz valley on the Romantic Road, roughly 90 kilometres south-west of Nuremberg and about 110 kilometres north-east of Stuttgart.

Its great distinction is the town wall: almost complete, ringed by some eighteen towers and pierced by medieval gates such as the Rothenburger Tor of 1390, it places Dinkelsbühl among the very few German towns to keep their fortifications whole. Within them, colourful gabled houses line the lanes and a night watchman still walks his evening round.

From royal ford to free imperial city

A Frankish king raised fortifications here in the ninth century to guard a ford across the Wörnitz, and the place first appears in writing in 1188, when Emperor Barbarossa granted the castle of "Tinkelspuhel". Elevated to a Free Imperial City in 1351, the town built its ring of walls between 1380 and 1440 and crowned its centre with the late-Gothic Minster of St. George, completed in 1499 - among the finest hall churches in southern Germany.

A town between Rothenburg and Nördlingen

Dinkelsbühl forms the middle of a trio of intact walled towns on the northern Romantic Road, with Rothenburg ob der Tauber to the north and Nördlingen to the south. The Renaissance Deutsches Haus, the House of History in the old stone town hall and the quirky Museum of the Third Dimension all reward a closer look, and a national magazine once named this the most beautiful old town in Germany - a verdict its cobbled lanes make easy to share.