🇩🇪Germany

Germany's capital carries the scars and the freedoms of the 20th century — Cold War memorials, Prussian museums, a techno scene born in reunification, and 180 km² of parks and lakes.

Wittelsbach royal city with the Alps as its backyard — beer halls older than most countries, Baroque churches, BMW HQ, and Oktoberfest's 6 million drinkers each September.

Germany's second-largest city and Europe's third-biggest port — a hanseatic republic of red-brick warehouses, more bridges than Venice and Amsterdam combined, and the Elbphilharmonie rising over the Elbe.

Rhineland's boisterous million-strong city with Germany's most-visited landmark (the Dom), 24 Romanesque churches, its own beer and dialect (Kölsch), and Europe's biggest street carnival.

Germany's financial capital and its most skyscraper-dense city — home of the ECB, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the reconstructed Altstadt (DomRömer, 2018), all threaded by the Main and its Museumsufer.

Saxon Augustus the Strong's Baroque residenz on the Elbe — flattened in February 1945, painstakingly rebuilt around the Frauenkirche (reopened 2005) into one of Germany's most beautiful skylines.

The Neckar valley town spared by WWII bombing — a ruined red-sandstone castle above Germany's oldest university (1386), a 1.6 km Baroque Hauptstraße, and the Philosophenweg on the opposite hillside.