Ландау ин дер Пфалц

Landau is the southern Palatinate's sunny capital, seat of the German Wine Route's most generous landscapes: almond trees blossom in March, vineyards run to the Haardt hills, and the surrounding villages — Ilbesheim, Leinsweiler, the wine princedoms of the Südliche Weinstrasse — treat Landau as their market, festival ground and cellar door. The city returns the favour with the Fest des Federweissen and a wine culture in which every season has its glass.

History fortified the pleasure: Vauban, Louis XIV's engineer, rebuilt Landau as a masterpiece French fortress town — the star-shaped works are mostly gardens now, but the French century shaped the streetscape, and the German revolutionary tradition claimed it back: the Palatinate's 1832 and 1849 democrats made the region a cradle of German liberty. A gentler native son drew his way to fame: Thomas Nast, born in Landau in 1840, emigrated and became America's founding political cartoonist — inventor of the modern image of Santa Claus and the Republican elephant; his birth house honours the improbable career.

The city's cultural flagship is the Festhalle of 1907, a Jugendstil concert hall of genuine splendour whose gilded auditorium hosts symphonic seasons and festivals; with the university campus's youth, the zoo's palms and the vineyards' horizon, Landau composes the Palatinate's good life in full. (This entry merges the duplicate records "Landau" and "Landau in der Pfalz".)