MEDIEVAL TOWN FULL

The Old Town Hall, with its yellow half-timbered façade overhanging the river, is a highlight of the beautifully preserved Old Town.īern and the Alps beyond (Photo: Martin Abegglen via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)Īlso born in the medieval era was the Swiss capital city, Bern, a relative baby at only 830 yeas old.

Broad influences from around the continent can still be seen in the green spires of Bamberg Cathedral, or the octagonal onion domes of the Schloss Seehof a nod to the city’s Slavic links. It grew rapidly to become a key hub of the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe. The first records of the city, which is located in Northern Bavaria, come from the year 902. While many major European cities have histories stretching back to Roman times and beyond, Bamberg was a child of the medieval era.

MEDIEVAL TOWN FULL

The 88 circular towers and walls span over 2.5km (1.6 miles), enclosing an old town full of 12 th– to 16 th-century monasteries, convents and basilicas, such as Ávila Cathedral, which was started in 1091, giving it a blend of Romanesque and Gothic features. But few have city walls quite so distinctive as those of Ávila, in central Spain’s Castile and León region, west of Madrid. As such, castles and fortifications form a common thread through much of this list. You’ll often find that the cities whose medieval centres are still largely intact today result from being well guarded through the centuries. Finally, this list is dedicated to places where that medieval flair can still be readily felt by visitors. And each place needed to have a significant collection of well-preserved medieval relics, such as places of worship, buildings, monuments, streets and town walls. Each place needed a current population of between 10,000 and 500,000. To make compiling this list slightly simpler (after all there are thousands of towns and cities across Europe whose histories reach back to medieval times), we set a few rules. Today, many of those medieval old towns still endure, offering a charming and tangible glimpse of a past that we can normally only imagine.

The Europe that emerged from these Middle Ages was a far more refined, advanced place, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and modernity beyond. From the Romans to the Renaissance there were major leaps forward in farming, art, religion and many other branches of intellectual thought. Not a single corner of the globe was untouched by the impact of Europe’s medieval centuries.

Lübeck Holstentor Sonnenaufgang (Photo: courtesy of LTM)

Medieval town