Herford Audio Tours

Charlemagne ordered a settlement built here in 789 to guard a ford across the Werre River, and the logic of that location has never stopped making sense. Herford became a Hanseatic city, a Free Imperial City, and then a Prussian market town, accumulating Gothic churches and half-timbered houses across thirteen centuries of use. The Herford Minster, built between 1220 and 1250, is one of Germany's earliest hall churches, its proportions generous and its stonework worn in the way that only genuine age produces.

The surprise is the MARTa museum.

Frank Gehry designed a building here in 2005 that plays with steel curves and angular volumes in ways that should have nothing to do with a small Westphalian city, and yet somehow it works. The contrast between the medieval minster a short walk away and Gehry's titanium-accented form says something about Herford's own comfort with contradiction. They brew Herforder Pils here, one of Germany's better regional beers, and the Northwest German Philharmonic calls the city home. None of this makes Herford famous, exactly, but it makes it worth a careful afternoon.