Nördlingen

The Nördlinger Ries is a circular basin about twenty-four kilometres across, long thought volcanic until 1960, when Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao identified shocked quartz in its rock and showed it was formed by a meteorite impact around fourteen and a half million years ago. Apollo astronauts trained here in 1970 to learn impact geology. The town sits in the middle and is built largely of suevite, the impact breccia, which contains microscopic diamonds formed by the shock; the church tower alone is estimated to hold several tonnes of them, too small to recover. The town walls are complete and fully walkable.

What you actually see

• The complete walls - a circuit walkable all the way round, roofed in parts.
• The impact stone - buildings of suevite containing microscopic diamonds.
• The Daniel tower - a 90-metre church tower climbed for the crater view.
• The Ries museum - the crater's geology and the Apollo training story.

When to go

April to October; the tower climb gives the clearest sense of the crater rim in good visibility. The town is far quieter than Rothenburg.

Honest expectations

The crater is only legible from the tower or with a map; at ground level it looks like ordinary countryside. The diamonds cannot be seen or extracted.

Nearby

Dinkelsbühl lies north; Harburg castle is south.