Bertha Benz Memorial Route from Mannheim

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Mannheim

   Mannheim is a city laid out like a chessboard, and that tells you most of what you need to know about it. The old centre was planned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Electors Palatine, who built a vast baroque palace on the flat ground where the Neckar meets the Rhine and then arranged the streets in squares with letters and numbers instead of names. Locals call it the Quadratestadt. You will find that nobody needs a satnav to cross the middle of town, which is a rare luxury for a rider starting a long day.

   Read the complete Mannheim write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Mannheim is where the day begins. Next is Schwetzingen.

2. 2. Schwetzingen

   Schwetzingen would be a large town with a medium-sized reputation if it were not for the palace garden, which is one of the great surviving Baroque landscape gardens in Europe. Elector Carl Theodor of the Palatinate made it his summer residence in the eighteenth century and spent decades improving it, adding a theatre, a pavilion shaped like a Turkish mosque, a fake Roman aqueduct, a temple to Apollo and long avenues of clipped trees that run out into the Rhine plain. The mosque has no function except to look foreign, and it has been doing so for over two hundred years.

   Read the complete Schwetzingen write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Schwetzingen comes up about 17 km into the recorded legs. Next is Wiesloch.

3. 3. Wiesloch

   Wiesloch has a plaque, a pharmacy and a very good claim to be the birthplace of the filling station. In August 1888, Bertha Benz, halfway through her pioneering drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim, ran out of fuel and stopped at the town's pharmacy, where she bought ligroin, a petroleum solvent usually sold in small bottles for cleaning. The pharmacist, so the story goes, had no idea what she was planning, and by the time she left the shelves were bare. That makes the Stadt-Apotheke in Wiesloch the world's first petrol station, and the town has not forgotten it.

   Read the complete Wiesloch write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 34 km into the recorded legs you reach Wiesloch. Next is Bruchsal.

4. 4. Bruchsal

   Bruchsal looks, at first, like an ordinary mid-sized German town, with a railway junction, a shopping street and a lot of postwar buildings. This is because the old centre was largely destroyed in an air raid in March 1945, but one thing survived or was rebuilt with obsessive care: the Baroque palace. The Residenzschloss was built in the early eighteenth century for the prince-bishops of Speyer, who moved their court here from Speyer, and its great staircase, designed with help from the architect Balthasar Neumann, is considered one of the masterpieces of the German Baroque. The building was badly damaged in the war and painstakingly restored, and the staircase now stands again in a pale oval hall full of light.

   Read the complete Bruchsal write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Bruchsal, late in the day. Next is Pforzheim.

5. 5. Pforzheim

   On a summer morning in August 1888, a woman named Bertha Benz took her two teenage sons, climbed into her husband's new Patent-Motorwagen without telling him, and drove from Mannheim to her mother's house in Pforzheim. It was about a hundred kilometres, the first long-distance journey by motor car, and it was a piece of brilliant publicity as well as a family visit. She bought ligroin, a petroleum solvent, from a pharmacy in Wiesloch, which is considered the world's first filling station, used a hat pin to clear a blocked fuel line and her garter to insulate a wire, and had a cobbler fit leather to the brake blocks, thereby inventing brake lining. The Bertha Benz Memorial Route follows that trip, and here is where it ends.

   Read the complete Pforzheim write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Finish at Pforzheim. That is the ride.