“On the lower reaches of the Rhine, where the banks of the great river start to lose their smiling countenance, where hills and cliffs with their audacious ruined castles rise defiantly exuding a wilder and sterner dignity, there lies, like an eerie legend from a bygone era, the gloomy and Read More …
Burg Stahleck, on a hill above Bacharach, is one of two or three dozen castles (depending on what you count as what) in the Middle Rhine Valley between Rüdesheim and Koblenz. There has been a castle on this hill since the eleventh century, if not earlier. Stahleck (which literally translates Read More …
Besides going by train or bicycle, another great way to travel up or down the Rhine from Bacharach is to take one of the regularly scheduled ships run by the Köln-Düsseldorfer (K-D) line. In the summer months they run five ships a day in each direction. Ships going downstream (north) Read More …
Around 1800 the German Romantic author Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842) wrote his ballad “Lore Lay”, which begins: Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt’ eine Zauberin Sie war so schön und feine Und riß viel Herzen hin. Which means more or less: In Bacharach on the Rhine there lived a sorceress. She Read More …
In 1840 the great French novelist Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and later Les Misérables, spent three days in Bacharach and wrote an enthusiastic description in his book Le Rhin (The Rhine), first published in 1842. “I have spent three days in Bacharach, a sort of Beggars’ Headquarters Read More …