"Winter Light Cologne" Cologne by antistar

A window of sunlight opened up in the stream of freezing cloud flowing over Northern Europe in the winter of 2011 - just for that one weekend we visited Cologne. It was warm enough not to wear gloves. The long rays of the sun in the morning and evening made for some amazing photographs, especially in the places around Cologne, like Bonn, Bruhl and Konigswinter.

Cologne is a suprisingly compact tourist destination. There's only really one great sight in the city, and everything of interest is crowded around that. But what an incredibly great sight it is: The once tallest building in the world, the unforgetable and epic Cologne Cathedral. Surrounding the cathedral are most of Cologne's greatest treasures, like the Altstadt, St. Martin's Church, the three humped Hohenzollern bridge and the Rhine. Even the train station itself is a architectural marvel.

Cologne, Germany

The city is probably more of a party town than a tourist destination, and this is noticeable in the kind of hotels on offer. One has an attached nightclub and a check-out time of 6pm to give its guests time to recover. Cologne is obviously famous for its masquerade carnival held every year around February, two days before Ash Wednesday. But the celebrations for this start in November the year before. And in summer you have music like the Reggae Summerfest. It never stops.

A commercial city since Roman times, and a free city of the Hanseatic League, Cologne has been hugely important in shaping European history. At over a million people the city is the third largest in Germany, it's the centre of an urban area numbering three million, and the largest city in one of Europe's great urban sprawls of perhaps 20 million or more people. Yet despite that it's never been the capital of anything. Dusseldorf took the title of regional capital, and little Bonn to the south surprised everyone by taking the national capital title after the war.

Cologne doesn't seem to care. But when you are truly great, why should you?