Visit to Germany

When in Germany it is compulsory to eat cake!

Over a long weekend in mid-February Paul and I visited Germany again, 

​We spent time with our friends [who we met in Adelaide on our fourth day of moving to Australia in 2010] who moved back to Germany in 2019, having been in Oz for over twenty years.  They recently moved (again) from Bonn to a small town outside Frankfurt called Koenigstein | City of Königstein .  

Check out the Spa and Tourism tab for details on this website to discover why it has been a popular destination for quite a few years, and also why it is home to a number of wealthy people. It has the reputation as a retreat for ‘health and wellness’ but it is for the restorative quality of the air as opposed to – as we are used to in the Cotswolds – for waters.  See:  Healing Climate .  The town is well established and boats its own castle (in ruins) – legends from 466AD and documentary evidence from 1215, with the he granting of town rights in 1313.  See:  History of Konigstein

The name 'Königstein' means 'King stone'. Local legend is that King Chlodwig (466-511), founded the town after building a castle on a hill as well as a chapel.

Other than eating and drinking and chatting we did manage one ‘touristy’ visit to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Upper Germanic-Raetian Limes, specifically Kastell Saalburg (translated as Castle Saalburg).  Kastell Saalburg is considered the best-researched and most completely reconstructed fort of the Upper Germanic-Raetian Limes and defines part of the “frontiers of the Roman Empire”. 

Just as GB has Hadrian’s Wall “the Germanic Limes was a line of frontier fortifications that bounded the ancient Roman provinces of Germania Inferior, Germania Superior and Raetia, dividing the Roman Empire and the unsubdued Germanic tribes from the years 110 (under Trajan) to about AD 260.  
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The Upper German-Raetian Limes extends to a length of 550km between the Rhine in the north-west and the Danube in the south-east.  It consisted of about 900 watchtowers, numerous small forts and over 60 large forts.  More a guarded border line than a military defence system, the Limes enabled traffic to be managed, movement of people to be controlled and goods to be traded and taxed”.