Jena occupies a dramatic position in the valley of the Saale river, where limestone cliffs and wooded hillsides press close on both sides of the water. The city has the feel of a place shaped by ideas as much as by industry, and this is historically accurate: the Friedrich Schiller University, founded in 1558, attracted a concentration of philosophical and literary talent in the 1790s and 1800s that remains almost unparalleled in German cultural history. Schiller himself lived and wrote here, Goethe visited frequently from nearby Weimar, Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit in the city, and Fichte and Schlegel held chairs here simultaneously.
The Carl Zeiss optical works, founded here in 1846, gave the city a second identity as a centre of precision optics and scientific instrumentation. The Zeiss Planetarium, built in 1926, was the world's first public planetarium and is still operational. The Deutsches Optisches Museum traces eight centuries of instrument-making with an outstanding Carl Zeiss collection. The Botanischer Garten, attached to the university, is one of the oldest university botanical gardens in Germany — Goethe used it as a laboratory for his plant metamorphosis theory. The Paradies park along the Saale provides the city's main green lung, and the river walks are excellent in spring when the limestone cliffs turn white with cherry blossom. The Jenzig — the steep hill above the eastern bank — provides a view over the valley that was painted extensively by Romantic artists; the traditional approach crosses the Camsdorf Bridge and ends at the Grüne Tanne inn.
The student population makes Jena feel younger and more animated than its Thuringian neighbours, and the city centre around the Marktplatz has a lively bar and café culture larger than you'd expect from a city of its size. The Friedrich Schiller University buildings and the Johannistor — the only surviving medieval city gate — anchor the central pedestrian area. Weimar is thirty kilometres west, making the two cities a natural double visit for anyone following the Thuringian cultural route.