Wismar, Germany: a UNESCO Hanseatic port of brick Gothic on the Baltic

The salt air, the gabled brick warehouses and the gulls wheeling over the old harbour leave no doubt that Wismar is a Baltic town. One of the great trading cities of the medieval Hanseatic League, it keeps an old town of brick Gothic churches and merchant houses so complete that UNESCO added it, together with neighbouring Stralsund, to the World Heritage List in 2002. A port of around 43,000 people in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Wismar lies on the Baltic coast about 30 kilometres north of the state capital Schwerin and roughly 60 kilometres west of Rostock, with Hamburg some 110 kilometres to the south-west.

At its heart spreads one of the largest market squares in northern Germany, a hundred metres on each side, watched over by the neoclassical town hall, the ornate Wasserkunst waterworks of 1602 and the celebrated Alter Schwede, a fourteenth-century house with a bold stepped gable.

Herring, beer and the Hanseatic League

Granted civic rights in 1229, Wismar joined Lübeck and Rostock in 1259 in a pact against Baltic pirates that helped shape the Hanseatic League, and grew wealthy on herring, cloth and its famous beer. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 the town spent more than a century and a half under Swedish rule, a chapter that left its own stamp on the streets and customs.

Churches of brick and a working harbour

Three towering brick churches once crowned the skyline: St. Nicholas survives intact, St. George has been restored, and only the great tower of St. Mary's remains after wartime bombing, now a viewpoint and memorial. Down at the Old Harbour, still busy with boats, the medieval basin and gabled storehouses complete a townscape that has changed remarkably little in centuries.