Leonberg

Leonberg bred a dog to match its coat of arms. In the 1840s the town's councillor Heinrich Essig crossed his way to a huge, leonine breed — the Leonberger — expressly to resemble the lion on the civic shield; the gentle giants conquered courts from empress to tsar, and their worldwide fancy still holds reunions in the town that named them. The older institution paces alongside: the Leonberger Pferdemarkt, the horse market chartered in 1684, turns the town into a festival of hooves and brass bands every February.

The historic core deserves the parades: a sloping market square of dense half-timber around the Renaissance town hall, and above it the ducal Schloss with Germany's rarest garden — the Pomeranzengarten of 1609, the only surviving terraced Renaissance orangery garden in the country, restored to its box parterres and bitter-orange pots, suspended like a balcony over the Glems valley.

Two intellects give the town gravity. Friedrich Schelling, philosopher of nature and freedom, was born here in 1775; and Johannes Kepler fought here for his mother — Katharina Kepler stood accused of witchcraft in Leonberg, and the imperial astronomer conducted her defence through years of proceedings until her release, one of history's most extraordinary son-advocacies, commemorated where it happened. Lions by design, oranges by terrace, reason by hard argument: Leonberg's heraldry runs deeper than the shield.