Drei Flüsse, ein Meer. Three rivers, one sea.

Scroll, and follow the water downhill.

QuelleSource

From the Spessart to Aschaffenburg, on the Main

Spessart

Every river begins as something you could cover with one hand.

„Jeder Fluss beginnt als etwas, das man mit einer Hand bedecken könnte.“

Here the oaks are older than most of the borders drawn around them.

Somewhere under last year’s leaves, a spring decides to leave.

Aschaff

A stream runs out of the forest and lends its name to a town.

The name joins two old words: one for the ash tree, one for water.

Schloss Johannisburg

Red sandstone, quarried from the valley, raised into a palace, and set back down beside the river it came from.

Begun in 1605, inaugurated in 1614. Badly damaged in the war, rebuilt between 1954 and 1964, its outside as it had been.

Thirteenth century

The keep

The medieval Johannisburg was largely destroyed in 1552. Its keep survived, and stands inside the Renaissance palace built to replace it.

1605 to 1614

Four wings, four towers

Georg Ridinger built the palace for Archbishop-Elector Johann Schweikard von Kronberg: red sandstone, four wings, four corner towers and a square courtyard. It was inaugurated on 17 February 1614.

1944 to 1964

Rebuilt as it was

The palace was badly damaged in the air raids. Between 1954 and 1964 it was rebuilt: the outside as it had been, the inside for museums, offices and a library.

In the collections

Rome in cork

Among the palace’s treasures are architectural models of ancient Roman buildings, made of cork.

989

The first bridge

Archbishop Willigis of Mainz is credited with a wooden bridge over the Main. The crossing gave Mainz a foothold east of its own city.

Pompejanum

Tradition says King Ludwig I called this town his Bavarian Nice, for its mild climate.

Then he built a Roman house above the river, full size, so that anyone could walk into antiquity. The Pompejanum, 1840 to 1848.

Chronik

Aschaffenburg, on the Main. Scroll along the river, or choose a year.

974First written mention

A charter of Emperor Otto II, dated 974, is the oldest surviving document to name the place. Older stories set a royal wedding here in 869. The town itself grew from settlement after settlement on the hill above the river, not from a single founding.

989A bridge over the Main

Archbishop Willigis of Mainz is credited with a wooden bridge here. The crossing gave Mainz a foothold east of its own city, and for roughly eight centuries the town answered to Mainz, downstream, where the Main meets the Rhine.

About 1520Grünewald

Matthias Grünewald’s Lamentation of Christ is still in the collegiate church of St Peter and St Alexander, a foundation more than five centuries older than the painting.

1552The old castle falls

Troops of Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach largely destroyed the medieval Johannisburg. Its thirteenth-century keep survived, and still stands inside the palace that replaced it.

1605 to 1614Red stone, four towers

Georg Ridinger built the new palace for Archbishop-Elector Johann Schweikard von Kronberg: four wings, four corner towers and a square courtyard. It was inaugurated on 17 February 1614.

1775A countryside, designed

Schönbusch was laid out on an old electoral game enclosure: lakes, streams, hills and winding paths. Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell joined by 1783. Everything there that looks natural was designed.

From 1810World city of decorated paper

The town’s factories made coloured, printed, embossed and marbled papers for book covers, boxes and cases, and sold them as far away as Russia and America. Aschaffenburg came to be called the world city of decorated paper.

Tap the sheet to drop colour, drag to draw it out. Marbled paper is made by floating colour on water; Europe once called it Turkish paper, after the Ottoman art of ebru.

1814Bavarian

After Napoleon’s fall the town passed to the Kingdom of Bavaria. Between 1840 and 1848 Ludwig I built the Pompejanum on the slope above the Main.

6 May 1880Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born at Ludwigstraße 19, opposite the station. He became a founding member of the Expressionist group Die Brücke: the bridge.

1938 and 1942The synagogue

In November 1938 SA men set fire to the synagogue and attacked Jewish residents. The deportations of 1942 destroyed what remained of the community; many of those deported were murdered. The former community and rabbinical building is now the Museum of Jewish History and Culture.

21 November 1944The heaviest raid

Air attacks killed 542 civilians in all, and destroyed or damaged seven homes in ten. The palace was rebuilt between 1954 and 1964, its outside as it had been.

The Main runs west. I went with it.

„Der Main fließt nach Westen. Ich ging mit.“

Water changes rivers by way of the sky.

„Wasser wechselt den Fluss über den Himmel.“

It is raining on the Odenwald.

TalValley

Through the Odenwald to Heidelberg, on the Neckar

Neckar

A valley is the shape water leaves behind when it has been patient long enough.

On a map, wherever a contour line crosses a stream, it bends into a V that points upstream, back toward where the water has been.

Alte Brücke

Wie der Vogel des Walds über die Gipfel fliegt,Schwingt sich über den Strom, wo er vorbei dir glänzt,Leicht und kräftig die Brücke,Die von Wagen und Menschen tönt.

As the forest bird flies over the summits, the bridge swings over the river where it glitters past you, light and strong, ringing with carts and people. Friedrich Hölderlin, Heidelberg, around 1800.

1786 to 1788

Alte Brücke

Ice destroyed the wooden bridge in 1784, and Elector Carl Theodor built this one in stone. German troops blew it up in 1945 as they withdrew. It reopened in 1947.

1979

The bridge monkey

Gernot Rumpf’s bronze holds up a mirror to passers-by. It revives a monkey recorded at the bridge in the fifteenth century and lost in the destructions of the seventeenth.

Heiliggeistkirche

A library, and a wall

The church galleries once held the Bibliotheca Palatina, carried off to Rome in 1623. From 1706 to 1936 a wall divided the building between Protestant and Catholic congregations.

After 1693

A Baroque old town

The street plan is medieval; most houses along it were rebuilt after the destructions of 1689 and 1693. The Haus zum Ritter, built in 1592, is a rare Renaissance survivor.

Philosophenweg

On the Philosophers’ Walk, everyone walks a little slower than they meant to.

Memorials to Hölderlin and Eichendorff stand along the path, facing the castle across the river.

Heidelberger Schloss

Burned in 1689, and again in 1693. Struck by lightning in 1764.

The Romantics decided the ruin was the point. Around 1900, after a long argument, the town agreed: one wing was rebuilt, the rest kept as it stood.

Chronik

Heidelberg, on the Neckar. Scroll along the river, or choose a year.

About 610 000 years agoA jaw in the sand

In 1907 a sand-pit worker, Daniel Hartmann, found a fossil human jaw at Mauer, near Heidelberg. It became the defining specimen of Homo heidelbergensis.

1196Heidelberch

The oldest surviving document to name the town spells it Heidelberch. Where the name comes from has never been settled.

1386The university

Elector Ruprecht I founded the university, the oldest in present-day Germany. In 1390 the town’s Jewish families were expelled; their property passed to the university, and the synagogue became a chapel.

1613An English wedding

Elector Friedrich V married Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, in London. For her he added the English Wing and began the Hortus Palatinus, a garden of terraces and waterworks by Salomon de Caus. In 1619 he accepted the crown of Bohemia; defeated in 1620, he is remembered as the Winter King.

1623The library leaves

After Tilly’s troops took the town in 1622, the Bibliotheca Palatina, kept in the galleries of the Heiliggeistkirche, was carried to Rome. Most of its German manuscripts came back in 1816; much of the rest is still in the Vatican.

1689 and 1693Fire

French troops burned the town twice and blew up the castle’s defences. The street plan of the old town is medieval; most of the houses along it are Baroque rebuilding.

24 June 1764Lightning

Lightning set the castle on fire. Plans to live in it again were given up, and the ruin began its second life, as a view.

1786 to 1788A bridge of stone

Ice destroyed the wooden bridge in 1784. Elector Carl Theodor had a stone one built in its place: the bridge in Hölderlin’s ode.

1859Reading light

Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff showed that every element writes its own lines into the light it gives off. Reading those lines, they found two new elements and named them for their colours.

1933 to 194022 October

Books were burned on Universitätsplatz on 17 May 1933; the synagogue was set on fire in 1938. On 22 October 1940 Heidelberg’s Jewish residents were deported to Gurs, in southern France. Of about 300 people, some 70 survived; 15 came back.

1945The bridge again

American troops took the town on 30 March 1945 with little fighting. Before they withdrew, German troops had blown up the Alte Brücke. It reopened in 1947.

1992Fremd im eigenen Land

Advanced Chemistry, a Heidelberg group founded in 1987, released a track about racism, citizenship and belonging. In 2023 the German UNESCO Commission recognised Heidelberg hip hop as intangible cultural heritage.

1 December 2014City of Literature

UNESCO named Heidelberg a City of Literature, for its living community of authors, translators, publishers, booksellers and libraries.

Every summer, the town sets its castle on fire again, so that no one forgets.

„Jeden Sommer setzt die Stadt ihr Schloss erneut in Brand, damit niemand vergisst.“

The red light remembers 1689 and 1693. The fireworks, by local tradition, an English bride who arrived in 1613.

Click the sky to light it.

Mannheim, Mainz

Two rivers give up their names to a larger one.

The Rhine does not ask where its water has been.

Hoek van Holland

Zout.

Salt: the first taste of the end.

Then water does the oldest thing it knows. It forgets its weight, and rises.

„Dann tut das Wasser das Älteste, was es kann: Es vergisst sein Gewicht und steigt.“

Westward, against the prevailing wind.

III

ZusammenflussConfluence

The Thames at London, and the rivers buried beneath it

Savoy Hotel, 1901

Monet came to London for the fog.

Without it, he said, the city would not be beautiful at all.

Move through it to clear it.

Palace of Westminster

Big Ben

Strictly, the name belongs to the Great Bell. The palace around it was rebuilt by Barry and Pugin after the fire of 1834; Westminster Hall survived. The hands on this clock keep London time.

1675 to 1711

St Paul’s

Christopher Wren’s cathedral, built after the Great Fire destroyed Old St Paul’s. Its own chronology gives 1711 as the year of completion.

The Strand

Lundenwic

Before London moved back inside the Roman walls, its port lay along this shore, trading with the Rhineland and northern France. The name Aldwych still means the old town.

Waterloo Bridge

Fog, and smog

Monet painted the old bridge here again and again, in fog. In December 1952 coal smoke made fog deadly; the Great Smog helped bring about the Clean Air Act of 1956.

The Embankment

Under the river wall

After the Great Stink of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers reshaped this riverside. Since February 2025 the Thames Tideway Tunnel has carried the work on beneath the river.

Portland stone

White, this time. A Jurassic seabed full of shells, cut from a Dorset cliff and stood upright to become a city.

The lost rivers

London buried its rivers and built on top of them.

The Fleet still runs beneath Farringdon Road and meets the Thames in the dark under Blackfriars. On Ray Street you can hear it through a grate.

Chronicle

London, on the Thames. Scroll along the river, or choose a year.

AD 47 to 50Londinium

The Romans founded Londinium on high ground at a river crossing. Boudica’s revolt destroyed it in AD 60 or 61. Around AD 200 they built the wall that would later outline the medieval City.

886Back inside the walls

After Rome withdrew, London moved west: Lundenwic, a trading port around today’s Strand and Covent Garden, dealt in goods from the Rhineland. In 886 Alfred refortified the old Roman town. The name Aldwych still means the old town.

1176 to 1209A street across the river

The stone London Bridge was a crossing and a crowded commercial street in one. Today’s London Bridge and Tower Bridge are different structures.

1613A wedding for Heidelberg

Elizabeth Stuart married the Elector Palatine Friedrich V here, then left for Heidelberg, where her arrival was celebrated.

1666The Great Fire

It began in a bakery on Pudding Lane and destroyed some 13,200 houses and 87 churches, Old St Paul’s among them. Wren’s cathedral was begun in 1675 and officially completed in 1711.

1858The Great Stink

The smell of the Thames forced the question of sanitation. Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers followed and reshaped the riverside. Some of London’s buried rivers ended up inside the system.

Schematic, not to scale. Dashed lines are buried rivers.

1863Under the streets

The Metropolitan Railway opened: the world’s first underground railway. The first deep-level electric line followed in 1890.

1884Zero

Greenwich was chosen as the reference meridian for the world. Somewhere between the North Sea and the city, the longitude on this page passes through it.

7 September 1940Fifty-seven nights

The Blitz began with 57 consecutive nights of bombing, striking the docks, homes, industries and civic buildings. Major attacks continued into May 1941.

December 1952Fog, and smog

The fog Monet came for was partly coal smoke. The Great Smog showed how deadly it could be, and helped bring about the Clean Air Act of 1956.

1959 and 1966Carnival

Claudia Jones organised a Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959. The outdoor festival in Notting Hill in 1966 was another step towards the Carnival London knows today.

February 2025Tideway

A new sewer, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, became fully operational beneath the river: the latest chapter in the work Bazalgette began.

Tideway

Here the river runs both ways.

Twice a day the North Sea walks back up the Thames as far as Teddington, as if it had forgotten something.

Cremorne Gardens, 1875

A rocket falls over the river, very slowly.

After Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold.

North Sea

All three rivers end here.

The Main and the Neckar by way of the Rhine; the Thames by its own wide mouth.

Dogger Bank

Under this water lies a drowned country.

Hills, rivers, forests, people. Then the ice melted and the sea came in, some eight thousand years ago. They call it Doggerland.

Eighteen thousand years ago

There was no sea here then. The Thames ran east across the plain and joined the Rhine.

Every river I have known was once the same river. Jeder Fluss, den ich kannte, war einmal derselbe Fluss.

O, the source. V, the valley. Y, the confluence.