Koblenz

Koblenz is named for a meeting: Roman Confluentes, where Mosel joins Rhine at the Deutsches Eck — the "German Corner", its colossal equestrian Kaiser Wilhelm surveying the two rivers' merging waters and the flags of every German state. Across the Rhine, the Ehrenbreitstein fortress — Europe's second-largest preserved fortress — commands the panorama, reached by a cable car swinging high over the river traffic; two thousand years of strategic real estate, now given over to museums, gardens and one of Germany's great views.

The city at the confluence opens the UNESCO-listed Upper Middle Rhine Valley: from here southward run the sixty castle-crowned kilometres of Loreley legend, and Koblenz plays gateway with pleasure — the old town's squares and the "Schängel" fountain's spitting rascal, the electoral palace on the riverbank, wine taverns pouring both valleys' Rieslings, and the "Rhine in Flames" summer nights when fireworks cascade from castle to castle above illuminated ship convoys.

Music history keeps a tender local footnote: Maria Magdalena Keverich, Beethoven's mother, was born in Ehrenbreitstein below the fortress — her birth house is marked, and the composer's Rhineland roots run through this shore. Today the Musik-Institut Koblenz, among Germany's oldest concert societies, the Rhenish Philharmonic and the theatre of 1787 — a working jewel of the electoral age — keep the confluence musical.