Maisons de la Weissenhof-Siedlung and Old Jewish Cemetery Worms
Plan this ride
Recorded distance
318 km
Riding-time estimate
4 h 44
Journey
Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Stuttgart Feuerbach it runs 318 km to Stuttgart Feuerbach; allow about 4 h 44 of riding. The stops in between: Hamberg Ditch, Speyer Cathedral, Old Jewish Cemetery Worms and back through Speyer Cathedral. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Scenic road chapters
Bertha Benz Memorial Route
Speed drops and stays down. Park rather than crawl through. 63 km through ground somebody thought worth listing. The road passes it rather than bypassing it.
Chapter facts
Length
70 km
Named road
Bertha Benz Memorial Route
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Maisons de la Weissenhof-Siedlung
In 1927, on a hillside overlooking Stuttgart, a group of the most radical architects in Europe built an entire housing estate in a few months as an exhibition of what modern living could look like. The Weissenhof Estate, organised by the Deutscher Werkbund under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, brought together Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, J.J.P. Oud and others, and their flat-roofed, white-walled houses became a manifesto for the International Style.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Maisons de la Weissenhof-Siedlung is where the day begins. Next is Hamberg Ditch.
2. Hamberg Ditch
Maulbronn is a small town in the folded country where the Kraichgau meets the Stromberg hills, and its Cistercian monastery is the best-preserved medieval monastery north of the Alps. The Hamberg ditch belongs to a very different part of the story, the hydrology that kept the monks fed and powered. The Cistercians were famous engineers, and at Maulbronn they dug ditches, built dams and shaped ponds so that the water supply could drive mills, fill fish ponds and flush drains. Parts of this system still survive in the surrounding woods, and UNESCO included the monastery and its water works in the 1993 listing.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Hamberg Ditch comes up about 42 km into the recorded legs. Next is Speyer Cathedral.
3. Speyer Cathedral
Some buildings impress you with height, others with mass. Speyer Cathedral does it with both, rising from the left bank of the Rhine with six towers and a long, rhythmic nave of red sandstone. It was begun around 1030 by the emperor Conrad II, the first of the Salian dynasty, and is generally considered the largest surviving Romanesque church in the world. Its crypt, a forest of sturdy columns and striped arches, holds the tombs of several emperors and kings, which tells you how central this town once was to the Holy Roman Empire.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
about 112 km into the recorded legs you reach Speyer Cathedral. Next is Old Jewish Cemetery Worms.
4. Old Jewish Cemetery Worms
The Heiliger Sand in Worms is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe, with gravestones going back to the eleventh century. Weathered sandstone slabs lean at angles among the grass and trees, carved with Hebrew inscriptions, some barely legible after nearly a thousand years. Pebbles and small notes lie on many of them, left by visitors as a sign of remembrance, especially on the grave of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, a great scholar of the thirteenth century who died in captivity. Together with the synagogue and ritual bath of Worms and the Jewish sites of Speyer and Mainz, the cemetery forms the ShUM Sites, listed by UNESCO in 2021, recognising the Rhineland communities that shaped Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the Middle Ages.