Quedlinburg & Region

The town’s geographical location makes it the “secret capital of the Romanesque Route”, one of Germany’s well-planned routes for culture-tourists. The green foothills of the Harz mountains provide a picturesque backdrop to a largely unspoilt culturescape steeped in thousand years of European history. The Brocken summit of the Harz is a mythical symbol of pre-Christian spirituality and rites which survive in the form of the annual Walpurgis festivities in Spring – popularized by Goethe’s classic drama “Faust” two hundred years ago.

Quedlinburg offers easy transport links to most of the region’s highlights – landscape-parks, castles, palaces and palace-gardens, ancient ruins, archeological sites, famous cathedrals like the one in the neighbouring county-capital of Halberstadt with its world-renowned mediaeval church-treasure, and many picturesque small towns that ring the Harz mountains like beads on a string.

Quedlinburg itself has a theatre of its own with a special Summer programme of drama, musicals, and concerts  on a famous open-air stage in a rocky forest-ringed amphitheatre above the  Harz resort of Thale. From their rising rows of seats spectators enjoy the view beyond the stage - rolling wooded hills and fertile fields stretching into the distance towards Saxony-Anhalt’s state-capital of Magdeburg.   A few miles further along the forested rims of the Harz, there is Bad Suderode, the restored oldest spa of the Harz with a calcium-rich spring - one of the world’s best natural antidotes against osteoporosis, the dreaded disease of the human bone-substance. There is an hourly shuttle-bus linking Bad Suderode with Quedlinburg.

And in Quedlinburg’s own cathedral on the castle hill, on Saturdays throughout the Summer, there are concerts of classic and modern orchestral and chamber music or virtuoso performances of outstanding quality.