Marburg climbs a steep hillside above the Lahn river, with a castle at the top, a Gothic church on the slope and a student at nearly every corner. It is a university town in the real sense: the university was founded in 1527 as the first Protestant university in the world, and roughly a quarter of the population is made up of students. That gives the narrow lanes of the old town an energy that few places in Hesse can match, with bookshops, cafes and bars crowded into every nook.
The Elisabethkirche, built in the thirteenth century to honour Elizabeth of Hungary, a landgravine who gave away her wealth to the poor and died young, is one of the first purely Gothic churches in Germany. It is a tall, pale building with two spires, and its interior holds Elizabeth's shrine, a golden reliquary that drew pilgrims from across Europe. The Landgrafenschloss above it, a mixture of medieval and later buildings, offers a fine view over the town and the valley, and the walk up is steep and worthwhile.
The Brothers Grimm studied here in the early nineteenth century, and the town forms part of the German Fairy Tale Route. In 1529 Marburg hosted a famous debate between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli about the Eucharist, which failed to settle their differences but shaped the Protestant world. In the late nineteenth century, Emil von Behring developed his diphtheria antitoxin here, work that earned him the first Nobel Prize in medicine and gave Marburg a lasting reputation in medical research.
The riding between Hanau and Kassel on the fairy tale route is gentle, through the Vogelsberg and the Lahn valley, with wide roads and long, easy bends. Marburg itself has narrow streets and heavy traffic, so park outside the old town and walk up. Fuel is easy in the lower town, and Cölbe, five kilometres north, has more. Evenings are lively and the cafes are open late, so it is a fine place to stop for the night.