The only German state capital with vineyards inside city limits — where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche were both invented and can be visited in adjacent world-class museums, and the Schlossgarten runs from Baroque palace to the Neckar through the city centre
Stuttgart is a city of 630,000 in Baden-Württemberg, the capital of one of Germany's wealthiest and most innovative states, set in a valley of vine-covered hills. Two of the world's most recognisable automotive brands were invented here: Gottlieb Daimler built his first petrol engine in a garden workshop in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt in 1885; Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen Beetle here in 1938. Both brands maintain world-class museums: the Mercedes-Benz Museum (2006, 125 years of automotive history in a double-helix building by UN Studio) and the Porsche Museum (2009, 80 vehicles in a…
Stutengarten (stud farm garden) was a 10th-century horse-breeding facility that grew into a market town under the Counts of Württemberg. Stuttgart became capital of the Duchy of Württemberg in 1495 and from 1806 the Kingdom of Württemberg — one of the medium-sized German states that industrialised rapidly in the 19th century. The city was 60% destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II; post-war reconstruction centred on the automotive and engineering industries that make Baden-Württemberg Germany's highest-GDP state per capita today. Carl Benz (working in Mannheim) and Gottlieb Daimler (Stut…