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Worms is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in northern Europe. The Celts called it Borbetomagus. The Romans built on that. The Burgundians made it their capital in the early 5th century, and their kingdom here gave rise to the Nibelungenlied, the medieval epic of heroes and catastrophe that still echoes in German culture. More than 100 imperial diets were held in Worms. The most consequential was in 1521, when Martin Luther refused to recant his theological positions before Charles V and was declared a heretic. The 1868 Luther Monument in the center of the city is still one of the largest Reformation memorials in the world.

The Worms Cathedral, a Romanesque imperial cathedral from the 12th and 13th centuries, is one of Germany's finest.

But the other structure that matters here is the Rashi Synagogue, first built in 1175 and one of the oldest synagogues in Germany. The Jewish cemetery at the edge of the old town dates to the 11th century and is believed to be the oldest surviving in-situ Jewish cemetery in Europe. Worms, known in medieval Hebrew as Varmayza, was a center of Ashkenazic scholarship for centuries. The ShUM sites of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.