For couples: 5 romantic city trips across Germany

• Bamberg’s historic taverns serve traditional smoked beer.
• As an open-air museum of European architecture, Trier is worth a visit.
• Worms is the home of “Liebfrauenmilch” and the Nibelungen legends.

Hand on heart: You would like to spend more time with your loved one, but you don’t know exactly when, how and where – after all, you want to make your partner happy. Then you are not alone, because according to a recent survey by the opinion research institute Ipsos, more than a third of the couples surveyed would like to spend more time together.

How about a romantic city trip in Germany? You hardly need any vacation days, a long weekend is enough and you can arrive in just a few hours. We present five romantic cities across the Republic that are not yet so overcrowded.

1. Bamberg: Discover Franconian Rome – with beer and beef ham

Bamberg may only have 73,000 inhabitants, but what there is to see in Upper Franconia’s 1,000-year-old model city not only blows away romantics. Like Italy’s capital Rome, Bamberg was built on seven hills and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The old town is the largest, intact historic city center in Germany because Bamberg was largely spared from bombing during the Second World War.

Medieval and baroque architecture amaze every visitor: Among the 1,200 architectural monuments, the four-towered imperial cathedral with the famous stone Bamberg rider, the old town hall with its frescoes that give the facade plasticity, and the oldest Stations of the Cross in the Republic stand out.

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In addition to strolling through the episcopal city, a gondola ride is one of the romantic highlights. On the Regnitz, original Venetian gondolas take you past the medieval half-timbered houses of the former fishing settlement in the Bamberg island town.

Anyone who needs a culinary refreshment can fortify themselves in cute cafés and historic taverns with “Zwätschgabaamäs”, an air-dried beef ham and a number of local beers such as smoked beer – because Bamberg is proud of its beer tradition.

2. Meersburg on Lake Constance: old castle, new castle and Alpine panorama

The oldest inhabited castle in the nation, magnificent palace complexes, winding alleys and romantic squares – and all of this right on Lake Constance: in the extreme south of the republic lies Meersburg, the gem for romantics. Here it is not only the location directly on Central Europe’s second largest lake and the view of the Swiss Alps opposite that are overwhelming, but also the magnificent buildings in the small town. The landmark is the 7th century castle with Scrooge’s Tower, which can be climbed from April to November and offers a fantastic view of the city, lake and mountains.

After a tour of the castle museum with the knight’s hall, castle dungeon, weapons hall, torture chamber and fountain room, the romantic highlight awaits in the courtyard on summer evenings: the “Carlina people” play music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on historical instruments by candlelight.

The next day, the prince and princess can continue straight away in the New Palace. The prince-bishop’s residence with its magnificent architecture was embellished in the 18th century by artists such as Balthasar Neumann and Giuseppe Appiani. The castle museum shows stucco work, frescoes and the courtly world of the Baroque period.

3. Trier: Stroll in the open-air museum of European architecture

The Roman emperors already loved them: with its more than 2,000-year-old past, Trier is not only a former imperial residence and Germany’s oldest city, but also one of the most beautiful in the country. This is due to the many well-preserved buildings from different eras and in various styles – from the Roman, Romanesque and Gothic periods to the Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism. UNESCO thought so too and made the Rhineland-Palatinate city a world heritage site 30 years ago.

The 100,000 residents are proud of their landmarks, the Porta Nigra, the Roman amphitheater, the imperial baths, the cathedral and the Church of Our Lady. But it’s not just the feeling of being in an open-air museum of European architecture that gives the episcopal and university town a special charm.

The location on the Moselle invites you to take romantic river trips. Now you are spoiled for choice: a candlelight dinner in the old town with a view of the magnificent Roman monuments or the river – of course with a glass of wine from the wine-growing regions of the Moselle, Saar and Ruwer.

4. Wismar: Hanseatic city with brick romance in the Mecklenburg Bay

Green, blue, yellow and brick red: Wismar indulges in a play of colors made up of the green of nature, the blue of the Baltic Sea, the yellow of the coastal sand and the red of the brick Gothic. And the city of 42,000 inhabitants is located in the Bay of Mecklenburg, between Lübeck, Rostock and Schwerin.

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Hanseatic city scores with churches in the brick Gothic style, with medieval town houses, five city gates in the city wall, a well-preserved defensive tower, the late Gothic princely court, its town hall in the classicist style and the largest market square in northern Germany.

In the Speicherstadt in the Old Harbor you can still feel the splendor of the Hanseatic era, when Wismar was a powerful trading city. Today the fishing boats are moored here, on the other side of the harbor yachts and ships of visitors to this romantic city in the north of the Republic rock.

5. Worms: Wine, Luther, Nibelungen saga and a sea of ​​flowers on the Rhine promenade

Drink a Liebfraumilch with your loved one in a romantic ambience? There is no place more suitable for this than Worms, where the famous white wine has its origins. The 2,000-year-old Rhineland-Palatinate city is surrounded by vineyards. In the third largest wine-growing community in Germany, it is not just wine that is a big topic, but also emperors and kings, myths and legends of the Nibelungs. Because most of the scenes in the heroic epic take place in and around Worms.

The dragon slayer Siegfried is immortalized with his own fountain and every summer the Nibelungen Festival takes place in front of the imperial cathedral. The epic can be experienced all year round in the multimedia Nibelungen Museum, where the heroes are resurrected. Another hero of the city of 82,000 is Martin Luther, who refused to recant his theses here in 1521. Memorial plaques in Heylshofpark, where a large art collection is also housed, remind us of this as well as the Luther monument.

If you need some relaxation in nature after so much sightseeing, take a ten-minute walk north past the Gothic Church of Our Lady to the Rhine promenade. The almost 100-year-old park with 25,000 plants is the green belt in the city. Speaking of meadows, forests, ponds: things get really romantic with a visit to the baroque Herrnsheim Palace, which is surrounded by a large park. Many weddings also take place here.