Rothenburg ob der Tauber: A Complete Guide to the Old Town, the Walls & the Christmas Market

Why Visit Rothenburg ob der Tauber?

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is a walled town of about 11,400 people that stopped growing four hundred years ago — and that is exactly why you can still walk it. War, plague and poverty froze the old town in place; the twentieth century nearly erased it; donors from around the world put it back stone by stone.

It sits on a spur above the Tauber valley in Middle Franconia, halfway along Germany's Romantic Road. The wall still runs the whole way round the old town, with a covered rampart walk carrying you along most of it, free, at any hour. Inside are cobbled lanes, painted gables, a town hall you can climb, and the most photographed street corner in the country. Come in December and the whole thing turns into a Christmas market. Come on a Tuesday in March and you may have the wall to yourself.

This guide walks you through what Rothenburg is, why it looks the way it does, when to come, and how to make the most of a day inside the walls. If you want the full story on the spot, the TouringBee audio guide walks it with you — 25 stops, offline, in your ears.

The Story of Rothenburg

A Castle, a Hill and a Free Imperial City

In 1070 a count looked at the hill above the Tauber and built a castle on it. A town grew up beside the castle a century later. Then, in 1274, King Rudolf of Habsburg made Rothenburg a free imperial city — it answered to the emperor and to nobody in between. That is the moment everything else follows from. Free imperial status meant money, and money meant walls, towers, a town hall and merchant houses with gables designed to be looked at.

The Meistertrunk: a Legend That Outlived the Facts

In the autumn of 1631 the Thirty Years' War arrived. Rothenburg had sided with the Protestants; the Catholic general Tilly took the town and, the story goes, condemned the council to death. Then he was offered a tankard of Franconian wine — three and a quarter litres of it — and made a bargain: if any man could drain it in one go, the town would be spared. The elderly mayor Georg Nusch stepped forward and drank the lot.

Be clear about what this is. The Meistertrunk first appears in a chronicle more than a century after 1631, and historians treat it as legend rather than record. But the town has kept it alive with a straight face ever since. On the Ratstrinkstube on Marktplatz, two windows flank the clock face; every hour from 10:00 to 22:00 they open and the mechanical figures of Tilly and Nusch play the whole thing out again. Whatever the archives say, this is now the story Rothenburg tells about itself.

Poverty Is Why It Still Looks Like This

The war left Rothenburg exhausted. Sieges, then plague, then debt. The town stopped expanding, stopped rebuilding in the fashion of the day, and slid quietly out of history for two hundred years. No baroque makeover, no nineteenth-century boulevards driven through the middle. When Romantic painters and travel writers rediscovered it in the 1800s, they found something almost nobody else in Germany still had: a complete medieval town that had simply never been modernised. Preservation here was an accident of being broke.

31 March 1945 — and the Bricks With Names on Them

Then it nearly ended. On 31 March 1945, sixteen aircraft bombed Rothenburg. Thirty-seven people were killed; around 275 houses, six public buildings, nine watchtowers and roughly 600 metres of the town wall were destroyed — close to a third of the old town. What stopped the rest from going was a phone call: John J. McCloy, the US Assistant Secretary of War, who knew the town, ordered General Jacob Devers not to shell it. Rothenburg surrendered instead.

The rebuilding took decades, and much of it was paid for by donations from all over the world. Look closely at the restored stretches of wall as you walk them: individual bricks carry the names of the people who paid for them, in a dozen languages. It is the least medieval thing about the walls and one of the most moving.

Plönlein, and the Problem With Being Photogenic

Two lanes fork around a yellow half-timbered house with a fountain in front of it, one climbing to a tower, one dropping to another. That is the Plönlein, and it is on more German postcards, jigsaw puzzles and film backdrops than any other street corner in the country. It takes about ninety seconds to see. Get there before nine or after six if you want it without a queue of tripods — and then keep walking, because the streets behind it are where the town actually lives.

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