Koblenz Audio Tours

The Romans built their fort here in 8 BC for the same reason everyone has always been drawn to this spot: two of Europe's major rivers converge. The Rhine and the Moselle meet at the Deutsches Eck, the German Corner, where a fourteen-metre equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I stands on the point between the two streams. You can see, from the right angle at the right time of day, the blue-green Moselle water sliding into the muddier grey Rhine without fully mixing, the two rivers running side by side for a stretch before they finally blend. The city name comes from the Latin confluentes, meaning at the confluence.

Koblenz is 2,000 years old and shows it in layers.

The Basilica of St Castor, founded by Louis the Pious in 836, stands on the Moselle bank near the confluence point. Across the Rhine, the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress watches over everything from its basalt cliff, the largest fortress complex in Central Europe. The Electoral Palace, finished in 1786 for the last Elector of Trier, sits directly on the Rhine embankment with a baroque grandeur that feels incongruously French for a German city. Which is almost fitting, since the future kings Louis XVIII and Charles X of France spent the early 1790s here, plotting the overthrow of the Revolution with an army of sixty thousand royalist emigres camped outside the gates.