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 impact is estimated to have left some 72,000 tonnes of these micro-diamonds across the area, far too small to recover. The town walls are complete and fully walkable.

History

In the Ofnet caves nearby, the archaeologist R. R. Schmidt found in 1908 two pits of human skulls, 27 in one and 6 in the other, laid out facing the setting sun and covered in red ochre, dated to the 7th millennium BC. The area lay in the Roman province of Raetia, with villas at Holheim and Baldingen and a settlement built in 85 C.E. that lasted until the Alemanni destroyed it in 259-260 C.E., and the name Nordilinga first appears in 898, the date the town celebrates as its founding. Under the Bishops of Regensburg it grew into a market town, in 1215 Frederick II made it an imperial city and the first wall was built, the Pentecost fair is first recorded in 1219, and at the crossroads of two great trade routes it traded in grain, livestock, cloth, furs and metal goods; two battles of the Thirty Years' War were fought here (Wikipedia, Nördlingen).

What you'll find

• 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.

Practical notes

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.

Key facts