Lüneburg, Germany: the Hanseatic salt town of brick Gothic gables near Hamburg

For a thousand years Lüneburg lived on what locals called white gold. The town sits directly above a salt dome, and from the tenth century until 1980 brine was drawn up and boiled into the salt that made it rich - the most precious commodity of the medieval north, hauled along the Old Salt Road to Lübeck. That wealth still shows in the brick Gothic gables and gently leaning houses of one of Germany's best-preserved Hanseatic towns. A town of around 78,000 residents, Lüneburg stands on the Ilmenau River at the edge of the Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony, about 50 kilometres south-east of Hamburg and roughly 120 kilometres north of Hanover.

The vast Am Sande square, lined with stepped-gable merchant houses, opens toward the soaring brick churches of St. John, St. Michael and St. Nicholas; the tower of St. John's leans visibly, a reminder of the ground subsidence left by centuries of salt extraction. The Gothic and Baroque town hall, with its many painted and panelled chambers, ranks among the finest in northern Germany.

White gold and the Hanseatic League

Recorded as Luniburc in 956 and enlarged under Henry the Lion in the twelfth century, Lüneburg was chartered in 1247 and rose to be one of the wealthiest members of the Hanseatic League, hosting the first Hanseatic Day in 1412. Salt shipped from here cured the herring of the Baltic and seasoned the kitchens of half of northern Europe. The German Salt Museum, in the former saltworks, tells that story today.

A town spared by war

Because Lüneburg came through the Second World War almost unscathed, its medieval core survives in remarkable completeness - more than a thousand brick houses, the old harbour with its timber crane, and the lively Stintmarkt quarter along the water. A university town now, it keeps the air of a place built on the steady fortune of salt.