Rothenburg ob der Tauber is a walled medieval town in the hills of Franconia, in the north-west corner of Bavaria. If it weren't real, it would look like a theme park: half-timbered houses leaning into cobbled squares, red-tiled roofs, defensive walls you can walk the whole way around, and towers rising over a bend in the Tauber valley. It is the single best-preserved medieval town in Germany, and it was preserved by accident — a combination of 17th-century economic decline (which left the town too poor to modernise) and some luck at the end of the Second World War, when a senior US general overrode orders and avoided bombing the old town on the strength of its historic value.
The result is a place that nearly every tourist bus between Frankfurt and Munich now stops at. It is the star of the Romantic Road. In high summer and around the Christmas markets it can feel oppressively crowded, but the coach-trip crowds clear out by evening, and if you stay overnight you can have the whole old town nearly to yourself at dawn and after dark. The Night Watchman's Tour, led by a guide in medieval dress with a lantern and a halberd, departs from the Market Square at 8pm nightly — the tour is genuinely good, historically serious, and one of the most popular things in town.
The essentials: walk the full circuit of the medieval walls (you can go up at multiple points, and it takes about an hour); climb the town hall tower for the view over the tiled roofs; visit the late-Gothic St Jakob's Church for Tilman Riemenschneider's carved Holy Blood Altar, a 1505 masterpiece of German sculpture; and step into the slightly unhinged Medieval Crime and Justice Museum, which has three floors of torture devices, shame masks, and legal curiosities that the children will remember for life. The Plönlein, the small forked street beneath two towers, is the most photographed view in Germany after Neuschwanstein.
Eat a Schneeball — a tennis-ball-sized lump of deep-fried shortcrust pastry dusted with icing sugar, unique to Rothenburg and better than it sounds — and try the Franconian wine and bratwurst at one of the old inns around Marktplatz. Stay for the Christmas market (late November through December), when the town is at its most magical but also at its most packed.