Lüneburg

Lüneburg's wealth came from a salt dome under the town, worked from the tenth century and supplying the Hanseatic herring trade through Lübeck; the salt made it one of the richest towns in northern Germany, and the money went into brick Gothic houses and a town hall with a Gothic court room. Extracting the brine dissolved the ground and caused subsidence, so streets and buildings in the older quarters visibly lean, sag and have been repeatedly propped and rebuilt. The saltworks closed in 1980. The Water Quarter around the old crane keeps warehouses, a brewery and the mill buildings on the Ilmenau.

Background

The first written record is a deed of 13 August 956, by which the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I granted the Lüneburg tax to a monastery raised there for Saint Michael. Far older traces exist: 56 axes with an estimated age of 150,000 years turned up in the 1990s during work on the autobahn between Ochtmissen and Bardowick. The ancient town may be the Leufana or Leuphana listed by Ptolemy. Since 2007 Lüneburg may officially call itself a Hansestadt, recognising its place in the Hanseatic League, and it is home to Leuphana University. It lies about 50 kilometres southeast of Hamburg and has roughly 77,000 residents, with around 103,000 in the wider urban area.

Source: Wikipedia, "Lüneburg"

The main sights

• The leaning buildings - subsidence from centuries of brine extraction.
• The brick Gothic - stepped gables and the town hall's medieval court room.
• The Water Quarter - the old crane, warehouses and mills on the Ilmenau.
• The salt museum - the industry that made and undermined the town.

When to go

April to October; the town is lively in term time with its university. Museums close Mondays. Christmas markets fill the squares in December.

Before you go

Some leaning buildings are propped and fenced. The salt museum is modest. The town is compact and seen in a day.

Nearby

Lüneburg Heath lies south-west; Hamburg is northwest.

Key facts