By Ines Keane
Stand on the Daniel tower and the town below you is almost a perfect circle. Beyond it, the farmland runs out flat to a line of low hills. That line is the rim of a crater.
Where it is
Wikipedia places Nördlingen in the Donau-Ries district of Swabia, in Bavaria, at 441 metres, about 115 km east of Stuttgart and 145 km north-west of Munich. It gives the population as 20,352 in the infobox and “approximately 20,674” in the article text; we show both. The Romantic Road route site, a tourism body, counts the town among its 29 stops over 460 km.
The wall you can walk all the way round
The Romantic Road site calls Nördlingen’s wall Germany’s only completely preserved town wall, with a walkway all the way around, and gives the walkable length as 2.6 km. Bavaria’s own tourism board says the battlements are 2.7 km and that the walkway is always open, day and night. The tourism board describes five gates, each with a fortified tower, and says no two towers are alike. The Romantic Road site counts 5 gates, 11 towers and 1 bastion. The Planetary Science Institute, a research outreach page, says the wall was completed in the 14th century, stands about 10 metres high and is the only one in Germany where you can walk the full medieval ring.
Wikipedia is more cautious. It says only that Nördlingen has one of very few completely intact town walls in Germany. “Only”, “one of very few”: the sources do not agree on how to say it, so we do not say it for them.
The tower called Daniel
The steeple of St George’s Church is nicknamed Daniel. Wikipedia and the Romantic Road site both give its height as 90 metres. Bavaria’s tourism board adds 365 steps and a 15th-century date, and says a night watchman calls out from it five times a night, at the full and half hours between 10 p.m. and midnight. Wikipedia says building of the church began in 1427. The Planetary Science Institute says it was completed in 1505. Those two dates describe a start and a finish, so they do not clash.
The stone is the story
Here the crater matters. About 15 million years ago, according to Wikipedia, Bavaria’s tourism board and the Romantic Road site, an impact formed the Nördlinger Ries. The sources differ on its width: Wikipedia says about 25 km across, the tourism board says 20 to 25 km. The tourism board adds that geologists confirmed the impact origin in 1960.
The impact left a rock called suevite, an impact breccia. The Planetary Science Institute says the church and the town wall are made almost entirely of it, and that the small black patches in the blocks are impact glass. Bavaria’s tourism board calls suevite “Schwabenstein” and says it was used for the Daniel tower. Wikipedia says the stone buildings contain diamonds, all under 0.2 mm across. It also cites an estimate of 72,000 tons of micro-diamonds in the area; we repeat that as Wikipedia’s estimate, not a figure we can check.
What does that mean for a walker? The wall and the tower are the crater, in a way. You are touching the stone it made.
A trading town
Wikipedia says Nördlingen was first mentioned in 898, received city rights from Emperor Frederick II in 1215 and became an imperial city. It lost that status in 1803, when it passed to Bavaria. It names tanners and weavers as the typical craftsmen, and trade in grain, livestock, textiles, furs and metal goods. The Romantic Road site describes the Pfingstmesse, a ten-day Whitsun fair first mentioned in 1219, as in the Middle Ages the most important supraregional trade fair in southern Germany. Wikipedia gives the same date and says the fair continues today as a folk festival.
The Hallgebäude, a commercial building of 1541 to 1543, is named on the Romantic Road site. We have no source for what it holds now.
The museum in the old barn
Bavaria’s tourism board says the Ries Crater Museum is in the Holzhof-Stadel, a building about 500 years old in the town centre. It says the displays include a piece of moon rock donated by the Apollo 16 astronauts. The Romantic Road site says the museum shows how the Ries landscape formed and covers the area’s geological past. Bavaria’s board also lists the Lindle geotope and the Ofnethöhlen caves, each with information boards, and Harburg Castle, southeast of the Ries.
Why go in the cold months
Our reading: a wall walk needs no ticket window and no season, which suits a winter day, since the sources call the walkway open at all hours. We have no source on winter weather, lighting or stall markets in Nördlingen and will not guess at any.
What kind of sources these are
Wikipedia, two tourism bodies (the Romantic Road site and Bavaria’s tourism board) and a research outreach page. None is an archive. The wall length, the step count and the crater width are all quoted from one source each and differ between them.
What we left out
Opening hours, tickets, tower access times, restaurant names, and the town’s twentieth-century damage, which belongs in its own piece. Sephari has no maker in Nördlingen to point to yet, and we will not invent one.
Quick answers
How long is the Nördlingen town wall? The Romantic Road tourism site gives a walkable length of 2.6 km. Bavaria’s tourism board gives 2.7 km and says the walkway is always open.
How tall is the Daniel tower? Wikipedia and the Romantic Road site both say 90 metres. Bavaria’s tourism board adds that it has 365 steps.
What is Nördlingen’s stone? The Planetary Science Institute says the church and wall are made almost entirely of suevite, an impact rock from the Ries crater, with black impact glass in the blocks.
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Roam first. Shop later.