Heidelberg

The great red-sandstone castle over the town, a romantic ruin since French troops sacked and blew it up in the 1690s and lightning later gutted the rebuilt parts. Its most gothic scar is the Gesprengter Turm, the Powder Tower, whose whole outer wall was split by a gunpowder blast and slid into the moat in one huge piece, where it still lies. In the cellars, the Great Tun, a wine barrel holding two hundred thousand litres.

Best shot The split Powder Tower, its blasted wall fallen open into the moat.

• Touristy

From 1778 to 1914 the university locked up its own misbehaving students here, for drinking, duelling and freeing the town pigs, and a spell inside became a badge of honour, so generations covered every wall and ceiling with painted crests, inky silhouette self-portraits, poems and signatures. The dim graffitied cells survive intact as a museum.

Best shot The cell walls smothered in student graffiti and silhouettes.

• Solo-friendly

A vast open-air amphitheatre cut into the wooded Heiligenberg by the Reich Labour Service in 1934 for Nazi propaganda rallies and all but abandoned after 1939, its grass-grown stone tiers now standing silent and eerie, best read as sober history. Higher up lie the ivy-clad ruins of a ninth-century monastery over an old Celtic site, and the Heidenloch, a hand-cut shaft plunging fifty-five metres into the rock, nobody quite knows why.

Best shot The overgrown amphitheatre tiers, or the monastery ruins nearby.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

The red-sandstone arched bridge of 1788, the ninth crossing where flood and war destroyed the wooden ones for centuries, its landmark the medieval twin-towered gate whose dark tower rooms once held a prison and customs post. At its foot crouches the Brückenaffe, a bronze monkey holding a mirror, a medieval joke that neither townsfolk nor outsiders were any better than the other.

Best shot The twin-towered medieval gate over the bridge.

• Touristy

A late-Gothic red-sandstone church on the market square, begun in 1398 as the burial church of the Electors Palatine and once home to the priceless Palatine Library up in its galleries. For nearly two centuries a wall split the nave so Catholics and Protestants could worship at once. Little merchant stalls are still built into the buttresses along its flanks, as they have been since the Middle Ages.

Best shot The Gothic tower over the market square; climb it for the roofs.

• Quiet

The Philosophenweg is the hillside path along the north bank once walked by the university’s professors and poets, with the classic view across the river to the ruined castle and the old-town spires, at its most brooding at dusk and in mist. Facing it, the Königstuhl summit rises above the castle, reached by Germany’s longest funicular, its top section still running 1907 wooden cars.

Best shot The castle ruin and old town across the Neckar from the walk, at golden hour.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

Heidelberg’s largest cemetery, opened in 1844 on an old vineyard slope and hidden behind high walls, a heritage-listed nineteenth-century park graveyard of monumental tombs, ivy and old trees, with the graves of Bunsen, Max Weber and the Weimar president Ebert, and a Jewish section with Holocaust memorials. Overgrown, statue-lined avenues, one of the city’s quietest corners.

Best shot The walled main gate, monumental tombs under old trees within.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A hotel in the oldest surviving townhouse in Heidelberg, a Renaissance merchant’s mansion of 1592 whose ornately carved red-sandstone front came through the fires and sackings that took the rest of the old town, corridors winding past art and suits of armour. Sixteenth-century timber, modern comfort, opposite the town hall.

• Adults only

The oldest inn in Heidelberg, going since 1472 and once the country’s oldest student duelling house, on the hill at the foot of the Philosophers’ Walk. Its Mensurstube is panelled in dark carved wood with fencing sabres hung from the ceiling and the carved names of nineteenth-century student corps, Bismarck among them. Big romantic suites in a very old building.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A third-generation family hotel wedged into a historic house right at the Old Bridge gate, a spot the Romantic poets loved, its rooms individually done and some looking over the bridge, a tavern and bridge-side beer garden below. Legend says Goethe asked for a room here and was turned away.

• Adults only

A boutique hotel in an elegant riverfront villa on the Neckar in the old town, a short walk from the bridge, breakfast served in an atmospheric vaulted stone cellar with a window onto the street. Classical old-Heidelberg character, individually furnished.

• Adults only
• Quiet

The Red Ox, a legendary student tavern in a building of 1703, run by the same family for over a hundred and eighty years, cramped and dark with heavy beams and panelling carved and inked with generations of student names, a piano most evenings. Bismarck, Mark Twain and Marilyn Monroe all drank here. So should you.

Best shot The dark carved-and-inked panelling of the old tavern room.

• Adults only

A fine-dining restaurant inside the castle itself, reached down a 1560 staircase into a sixteenth-century vaulted wine cellar, the old barrel alcoves still recessed in the stone, refined French-leaning cooking and a deep Riesling list. Dinner in the ruin, evenings only.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A tiny candlelit wine tavern on a quiet lane in a former cooper’s workshop that turned from making barrels to selling wine around 1900, its guests sitting at the actual old workbenches by candlelight among the cooperage’s tools, sharing tables over Baden and Palatinate wine. Family-run, and snug as a hold.

• Adults only

A cramped, dim dive bar on the old-town bar street since 1970, built around a real acacia tree that grows up through the middle of the room, walls crammed with offbeat art, the soundtrack rock and punk, students and locals till the small hours. A cult institution, not a cocktail lounge.

• Adults only
• Party scene

An owner-run antiquarian bookshop since 1986 filling several floors with old books across five centuries, philosophy and history to Judaica, art and the occult-adjacent, plus original prints and vinyl, the labyrinthine floor-to-ceiling shelves reached by a spiral staircase. A bibliophile’s dream in a famous book town.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A used-vinyl and CD shop since 1983, rock, jazz, classical and heavier stuff plus films, records lining the window, a survivor of Heidelberg’s independent record scene and a reliable stop for metal and rock on wax.

• Solo-friendly

A small esoteric shop tucked in an old-town side street off the market, tarot and oracle decks, pendulums, incense, healing-stone jewellery, candles and books, its apothecary-style displays of spell bottles, crystals and hand-labelled jars, with in-store tarot and energy readings. Witchy and curious.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet