"Bergstrasse - Mountain Road - Old Roman... " a Naturpark Bergstrasse-Odenwald Travel Page by christine.j

Update September 2009:
Another restaurant tip and a tip about Viernheim

Update May 2009:
I only updated the tip in the sports section.

The stretch of land between roughly Darmstadt in the North and Heidelberg in the South is called Bergstrasse, not to be confused with the administrative district of the same name, which is only part of this area.
About 2000 years ago the Romans started building one of the roads there and up to this day Roman artefacts can still be found.
Travelling up towards Darmstadt you can see several castles on the top of the mountains, overlooking the wide plain beneath them.
I'm going to work constantly on this page, as I want to add information about some of the small towns there.

Since I'm going to write about several towns here on this page, I will start each tip with the name of the respective town, so that it's easier to know which tip belongs to which town.

To write about Darmstadt here is absolutely unnecessary, as there are excellent pages on VT and mine could at best be a weak copy. Have a look at the Darmstadt pages of VT members Trekki
and scottishvisitor
if you want to read more about this interesting city.
Here is just one picture of the beautiful Russian Chapel there with the fountain in front of it.

The same is true for Heidelberg at the other end, there are lots of very good pages on VT. On this page here I'd like to introduce some of the lesser known parts of the Bergstrasse.
Two of the smaller towns have a page of their own,
Ladenburg
and Weinheim
The picture shows the -rebuilt - bridge near Weinheim, called the Roman Bridge, since it was erected at this spot by the Roman soldiers. The very impressive tree next to it is called the "gallow tree". I wasn't able to find any exact information if this was the the place of the gallows, but it seems very likely.