A beautiful city with spacious squares and a fine, partly rebuilt, Renaissance castle - we particularly enjoyed the German Pharmaceutical Museum there!
In August 2014 we headed up to Heidelberg, principally to meet family and watch our nephew Tom take part in the Formula Student competition for the University of Huddersfield where he was in his final year - also a good opportunity to explore this lovely city.
Before going into Heidelberg we stopped at Schwetzingen, just to the west, for lunch at a restaurant with its own brewery. First we walked around the extensive castle gardens.
In the 18th century Schwetzingen was the summer residence of the Palatine Prince Electors.1 These were aristocrats who ruled the area known as the Rhineland Palatinate and were members of the council which elected the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. As such they were hugely influential and rather rich.
The gardens were landscaped first in a formal French style and then in a more natural style at the end of the 18th century, including follies and ruins.
The castle gates are right on Schlossplatz in the centre of the town, very convenient, especially as it was a very hot day.
I'm not particularly keen on formal gardens in this style, but the borders were colourful and some of the bridges and canals very pretty.
Lunch was very good though - flammkuchen for Andrew and sausages for me, both washed down with the excellent beer brewed on site.
The restaurant is actually a small (by Munich standards!) beer hall but we ate outside under a shady umbrella.
We headed into Hockenheim before checking in at our hotel to surprise Tom. Formula Student is "Europe’s most established educational engineering competition which uses motorsport to inspire students."2 Tom was competing with his team from the University of Huddersfield in the UK. We watched them do very well on the skid pad before heading off to check in.
The following morning we went back to the race track to watch and left after lunch to do a bit of sight seeing in Heidelberg before dinner.
The oldest university town in Germany, Heidelberg is a beautiful city, with expansive squares, lovely buildings, a fine castle and lots of good places to eat and drink.
We wandered down to the River Neckar before heading up to Marktplatz.
Statue of Perkeo on the Gasthaus Perkeo.
Virtually the whole of Heidelberg was destroyed during the War of Succession towards the end of the seventeenth century. One of the few buildings to survive is the beautiful late Renaissance Haus "zum Ritter Saint George",3 the Knight's Mansion, now a hotel.
The early nineteenth century University Library holds many old and valuable manuscripts, including fine medieval illuminated manuscripts. Some of these are displayed in the exhibition gallery. The university has made a good number of documents available online in their digitized collection.
The castle stood for hundreds of years before its destruction in the late 19th century during the War of Succession. It was another 200 before restoration began, and the whole castle was never fully rebuilt, but it has some fine Renaissance structures.
A funicular whisks you up the hill.
View of the city from the castle.
The Great Vat is really amazing. It is a huge wooden barrel, dating from the end of the 18th century, which can hold 49,000 gallons of wine! On top is a platform where there was wine-tasting or dancing.
In the early 18th century the court jester Perkeo was put in charge of the castle wine reserves by Prince Elector Charles Philip, perhaps not the wisest move given his legendary capacity for wine-drinking!
The castle is also home to the German Pharmaceutical Museum which we found fascinating. Some of the old pharmacy interiors and their pottery jars are beautiful.
Many of the ancient remedies might be regarded as poisonous now!
