Quedlinburg

Quedlinburg lies just north of the Harz mountains in the west of Saxony-Anhalt. An influential and prosperous trading centre in the early Middle Ages, it became a seat of the Ottonian dynasty in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The castle, the church and an old town of around 2,100 timber-framed houses date from that period of influence and survived the twentieth century largely intact. The result is one of the largest continuous areas of half-timbering in Germany, and it is walked rather than driven.