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Rostock sits at the point where the River Warnow meets the Baltic, and its entire history has been shaped by that geography. Founded in the 11th century by Polabian Slavs and rebuilt after Danish King Valdemar I burned it in 1161, the city grew into one of the major ports of the Hanseatic League -- the medieval trading network that stretched from London to Tallinn and made the north German coast wealthy. The brick-Gothic architecture that trade paid for is still standing: the Town Hall on the Neuer Markt, the great barrel of St. Peter's Church, and above all St. Mary's Church with its astronomical clock from 1472, which still works and still shows the phases of the moon and the positions of the planets as understood in the 15th century.

The University of Rostock, founded in 1419, is one of the oldest in Europe and gives the city a continuous intellectual thread running beneath its industrial history.

The shipyards that made Rostock the East German coast's premier port eventually declined after reunification, and the city spent the 1990s in a difficult contraction that it has been working out of since. Today the Kröpeliner Straße pedestrian zone is lively, the waterfront has been regenerated, and the Hanse Sail festival every August draws over a million and a half visitors for four days of tall ships, maritime music, and harbor celebration.