A short walk west from the centre brings you to a small wooded hill with a calm panoramic view over the entire old town. The Kalkberg is what is left of a much larger gypsum outcrop — the cap rock of a deep salt dome — that supplied the lime kilns and gypsum quarries that fed the medieval city's building trades for six hundred years. By the 1920s it had been quarried down so far that locals petitioned for its protection.
Today it is a quiet 56-metre hill of grass, beech, and limestone outcrops, reached by a short ascent from Auf dem Schmaarn. The summit terrace gives a clean line of sight across the old town's three church spires. A useful early-evening walk; combine with the Salt Museum, just downhill.