Фрайбург

Freiburg is Germany's sunniest city, and it behaves accordingly. The capital of the Black Forest's southwestern corner lives outdoors: in the Bächle, the little medieval streams that run through every street of the old town — step in one accidentally, tradition warns, and you will marry a Freiburger — in the market on the cathedral square, and on the vine-covered slopes that begin at the tram terminus. Above it all rises the Münster, whose filigree openwork spire the historian Jacob Burckhardt pronounced "the most beautiful tower in Christendom"; the church survived the bombs that levelled the streets around it, and its gargoyles — including one famously irreverent one — still comment on the town below.

The university, founded in 1457, made Freiburg a capital of thought: Erasmus taught here, and in the twentieth century Husserl and Heidegger made it the world headquarters of phenomenology, with Hannah Arendt among the students. The intellectual seriousness now wears green: Freiburg is Europe's showcase ecological city, its Vauban district a global pilgrimage site for sustainable urbanism, its solar research the continent's most advanced.

Culture keeps pace: the Theater Freiburg with opera and drama, the Freiburg Philharmonic, the SWR's storied contemporary-music tradition and the world-renowned Freiburg Baroque Orchestra — period performance's gold standard — make this town of gargoyles and streams a musical address of the first order.