Weinheim & Heppenheim
Recently we made a day trip to two small medieval towns. We started with Weinheim. Filled with half-timbered houses, the old town center was small but charming.
Weinheim also provided a nice view of Windeck Castle, 12th century castle ruins. By the way, Weinheim is known as the town of two castles. The other one, Wachenburg Castle was built in the early 20 century on the top of the neighboring hill, which wasn't easily seen from the old town.
The main reason to visit Weinheim was to see the Botanical Garden of Hermannshof, located at the edge of the old town. According to the town's website, the 200 years old garden was redesigned in the early 1980s as a botanical garden for shrubs. Around 2,000 types of shrubs are scientifically supervised and studied there but I was particularly looking forward to seeing wisterias, hoping they were in bloom. Yes, they were blooming gorgeously! The entire garden was amazing. We spent about an hour, happily wandering in the magical shrub wonderland.
Then we drove to the other town, Heppenheim for lunch. Heppenheim is located north of Weinheim, about a 20-minute drive away. Heppenheim's old town also provided a nice view of half-timbered houses as well as a hill-top castle although the old town itself seemed a little smaller than that of Weinheim. Either way, what they have in common is that both towns are laid-back, not crowded with tourists, at least when we visited them.
Interestingly there were the street lamps decorated with silhouette cut-outs. Apparently each cut-out tells a different story of Hessian legends and more than 150 legends are found in the old town!
The 11th century castle, the Starkenburg Castle was crowned on the hill. We managed to see a tower (or keep?) of it from the old town.
For lunch we tried a tapa restaurant, Empanada at the Marktplatz. We both had chicken empanada. It tasted nice but the portion was huge! I was too full to think about dessert at that time.
It was a lovely day out in such a beautiful weather. Also it was enjoyable to discover new medieval towns with half-timbered houses within a hour drive from home.
