Bad Homburg audiotours

Bad Homburg became fashionable because Kaiser Wilhelm II chose it for his imperial summer residence starting in 1888, and emperors have a way of making real estate desirable. But the town had already built its reputation on mineral springs, a casino, and a park that Edward VII of England visited so regularly that the distinctive soft felt fedora he wore here became permanently associated with the place. The Homburg hat: named after this quiet hillside town in the Taunus mountains north of Frankfurt. The casino, built in 1841, was one of the inspirations for Dostoyevsky's The Gambler.

The spa park itself, the Kurpark, is one of Germany's most elegant, planted with sequoias and specimen trees that were already old when Victoria was queen.

The Saalburg, a fully reconstructed Roman fort a few kilometres out of town in the Taunus hills, offers an extraordinary look at what a working frontier garrison looked like in the 2nd century AD. Bad Homburg is one of the wealthiest towns in Germany by income statistics, which you can read in the quality of the shop fronts and the unhurried pace of the Louisenstrasse. The WTA tennis tournament held here each June before Wimbledon has gradually made it an international name again.