Heidelberg and Cultural Wonders in Southwestern Germany, Heidelberg, Germany

During my roadtrip through Germany last summer, I tried to visit as many UNESCO sites as possible. It’s something I’ve done for a few years during my travels, and I’m currently up to 120 sites worldwide. The UNESCO World Heritage Sites are places designated by the UN for their outstanding cultural and/or natural heritage and their importance to the collective interests of humanity – and usually, that means they’re places well worth exploring.

Germany has a lot of them, 51 to be exact, and I managed to visit 19 of them last year. Four of them were in one single day, when I travelled from the Black Forest and up north near Frankfurt am Main via the historic city of Heidelberg.

I set off in the morning after visiting Maulbronn Monastery which I covered in my previous post about the Black Forest. My next destination was yet another Christian monument, the Speyer Cathedral. Considered to be a turning point in European architecture, the cathedral with its four towers and two domes was founded in 1030 and remodelled at the end of the 11th century. For almost 300 years, it was the burial site of the German emperors and kings, and it remains the largest Romanesque church in the world, and one of the most important of its kind in Germany. In 1925, Pope Pius XI raised the rank of the cathedral to a minor basilica of the Roman Catholic Church and today, the cathedral is the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Speyer. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).