Lüneburg got rich on salt, and the evidence is on every street corner. For a thousand years brine was pumped up from under the town and boiled down into what the Hanseatic merchants called white gold, then carted along the old Salt Road to Lübeck and shipped across the Baltic to preserve herring. The money built brick gables of tremendous height and swagger, a town hall with rooms that are still painted and carved to dazzle, and a harbour on the little Ilmenau river with a wooden crane that hauled barrels onto barges. The old crane is still there and worth a look.
The odd part is that the old houses lean. Centuries of salt extraction made the ground sink unevenly, and whole rows of buildings tilt as if they were listening to each other. Streets in the Sülze quarter bend and dip in ways that are not charming by design. The saltworks closed in 1980, but the old town was left largely intact, and the university and the students now fill the cafés that the merchants once filled with hogsheads of herring.
For a rider, Lüneburg is a straightforward and satisfying meal stop. It is big enough, more than seventy thousand people, to have fuel on the edges, supermarkets and a wide choice of places to eat, from fast bakeries to proper restaurants with heath lamb, local potatoes and the regional dish called Labskaus, a mash of corned beef, beetroot and potato that looks worse than it tastes. Parking a bike near the old town is usually easy, though the cobbles around the Am Sande square are rough, and the lanes inside the core are narrow. Go on foot from the first sensible place you find.
Coming in from the heath side the approach is calm, long and pretty open, and from the Elbe side it is flat and fast. Weekends in summer fill the centre, so earlier in the day, or a weekday, suits better. Allow yourself an hour to walk down to the river and back before you gear up again. You will see why people stay.