Ludwigshafen Audio Tours

Ludwigshafen exists because of chemistry. BASF, the world's largest chemical company, relocated its factories here in 1865 and the city grew up around them, defined by the plant and the Rhine river it sits beside. The relationship is so foundational that the company and the city sometimes seem like different parts of the same organism -- BASF employs around 40,000 people in Ludwigshafen, and the plant complex, visible across the Rhine from Mannheim, occupies a patch of land larger than Monaco. The city was bombed in 121 separate Allied raids during the Second World War, targeting the chemical production, and the reconstruction that followed left little of the pre-war fabric standing.

What the rebuilding left is a modern Rhine-side city with a few unexpected cultural landmarks.

The Wilhelm-Hack-Museum houses one of Germany's better collections of classical modernism, and its entire exterior facade on one side is covered in a ceramic mural designed by Joan Miró -- a collaboration between the artist and Josef Llorens Artigas that turns the museum building itself into a work of art. The city also has four underground tram stations, built in the 1970s for a planned unified network with neighboring Mannheim that was never completed; the stations exist, tiled and atmospheric, leading to no trains.