Germany's most beautiful university town — punting on the Neckar
Tübingen is a medieval university town on the Neckar River in Baden-Württemberg where students have outnumbered permanent residents for centuries. Half-timbered houses climb from the willow-fringed riverbanks to a hilltop castle, and the Hölderlin Tower — where the poet Friedrich Hölderlin spent his final 36 years — overlooks a bend in the river. Punting in flat-bottomed Stocherkähne is a summer institution, and the old town's bookshops, beer gardens, and university life give it an intellectual vibrancy that larger cities can't match.
Tübingen has been a university city since 1477, when Count Eberhard im Bart founded the Eberhard Karls Universität — one of Germany's oldest. Kepler, Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin all studied here. The city avoided significant bombing in World War II (reportedly spared because it was a 'Dichterstadt' — a city of poets), leaving its medieval Altstadt almost entirely intact. In 1977, the town became the first in Germany to elect a Green Party mayor.