Goslar is one of those towns that makes you stop the engine and simply look. It sits on the northern edge of the Harz mountains in Lower Saxony, and it was for centuries an imperial city, with a palace where German emperors held court in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Kaiserpfalz, a huge Romanesque hall restored in the nineteenth century, still stands on the hill, with murals showing scenes of imperial history. Around it the old town is a maze of cobbled lanes, crooked half-timbered houses and slate-roofed gables, so well preserved that UNESCO listed it in 1992.
The wealth that built it came from the Rammelsberg, the hill just above town, where silver, lead, copper and zinc were mined for roughly a thousand years, until the mine closed in 1988. The mine is now a museum, and visitors can go underground and see the old galleries and waterwheels. The market square has a clock whose figures emerge to perform scenes of mining life, and the Kaiserworth, a tall guild house, stands on the corner. There is a real sense here of a city that was built on rock and ore.
The way in is part of the experience: you leave the plain, climb through woods and then drop into the town, with the old walls and towers coming into view. Cobbles in the old centre are rough and wet-slippery, so go slowly and park outside the pedestrian area. The roads out toward Bad Harzburg and the Oker valley are the real riding, with long bends through forest.
Goslar has more than forty thousand people, so fuel, food and everything else are easy to find, and the old town has cafes and restaurants of every kind, with game, hearty stews and a good deal of beer. In summer the market square is full of tables and the atmosphere is cheerful, and in December the Christmas market makes the town a magnet.
The weather in the Harz is changeable, with fog and rain in autumn and snow in winter. A clear spring morning, with the sun on the slate roofs and the smell of woodsmoke, is hard to beat.