Nördlingen

Where it sits. Nördlingen stands in the middle of a near-perfect circular basin on the Swabian edge of Bavaria, in the Donau-Ries district, roughly 115 kilometres east of Stuttgart and 145 northwest of Munich. The basin is the Nördlinger Ries, a meteorite impact crater about 25 kilometres across and some 15 million years old, and the town of roughly 20,600 people sits close to its centre. The street plan is a set of concentric rings inside a complete oval wall, so the town reads from the air as a circle within a circle — a coincidence of medieval planning and cosmic accident that no other European town can match.

The story behind it. First recorded in 898, Nördlingen grew rich on a medieval trade fair and became a free imperial city. It gave its name to two battles of the Thirty Years' War, in 1634 and 1645, the first of which was a catastrophe for the Protestant side. What preserved the town was its subsequent decline: with the fair gone and the railways late, there was never money or reason to pull down the fortifications. Today it is one of only four towns in Germany with completely intact town walls, alongside Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Dinkelsbühl and Berching — all in Bavaria. The impact origin of the basin was only established in the 1960s, when Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao identified shocked quartz in the local building stone. In 1970 Apollo astronauts trained in the Ries to learn how to read impact geology before flying to the Moon.

On screen. Nördlingen supplied the aerial images at the end of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), when the glass elevator bursts through the factory roof and flies over a walled town far below. The rest of the film was made in and around Munich; those closing shots are the only location work here, and they are also the source of a persistent confusion, because a great many people attribute them to Rothenburg ob der Tauber. They are Nördlingen. The town's other screen association is second-hand but far larger: its complete ring wall closely resembles the walled town of Shiganshina in Attack on Titan, and after a Japanese variety programme featured the place in 2013 it became a pilgrimage stop for fans of the series. There is no official connection between the manga and the town, and the local tourist office is careful to say so — a rare instance of a destination declining to overclaim a film credit.

What you actually see today. The wall is the attraction. It runs about 2.6 kilometres, has five gates and a set of towers, and — uniquely in Germany — the covered wooden walkway on top is continuous and free to walk at any hour, so it is possible to circle the entire town under a roof, looking down into gardens and workshops on one side and out to the crater floor on the other. At the centre, St George's Church carries a 90-metre tower called the Daniel, built of suevite, the impact breccia thrown out by the meteorite and still full of microscopic diamonds and shocked quartz; climbing it means a few hundred steps for the best view of the ring plan, and a tower keeper still calls the old cry So, G'sell, so into the night from the top. The Ries Crater Museum, in a restored barn in the tanners' quarter, explains the geology properly and holds a lunar sample. The thirteenth-century town hall, the Spital and the Bavarian Railway Museum fill out a compact half-day. A separate town-wall museum occupies the Löpsinger Tor and explains how the defences were manned; a full circuit of the walkway takes about an hour at a slow pace, with five gates to drop out of if the weather turns.

Getting there and timing. Nördlingen is on the Romantic Road between Dinkelsbühl and Donauwörth, with regional trains from Aalen and Donauwörth and a straightforward drive from the A7 or Munich. Most visitors come as a stop between Rothenburg and the Alps, which means midday is busiest and mornings and evenings are almost empty. The Stabenfest, a children's spring festival, falls in May, and the town stages a large historic wall festival every three years. The wall walk has steps at every tower and no step-free option; the streets inside are cobbled but flat, and the main square is manageable. Two nights are unnecessary, but one evening is worth it — the walls are lit and the town is entirely yours after the coaches leave.