Monschau

Monschau hides in a fold of the Eifel so narrow that the town had nowhere to grow except upward and closer: slate-roofed, half-timbered houses crowd both banks of the rushing Rur, stacked storey over jetted storey, joined by little bridges and lanes that were never widened because the valley forbade it — the result, preserved almost untouched for three centuries, is one of Germany's most complete townscape miracles, a place that appears exactly as the eighteenth century left it.

The prosperity that built it was woven: Monschau's fine-cloth merchants clothed Europe's courts, and their monument is the Rotes Haus — the Red House of the Scheibler dynasty, whose interior preserves a patrician world complete, crowned by a free-hanging oak spiral staircase carved through three floors, a masterpiece of joinery that alone justifies the journey. Above the roofs, the castle — now a youth hostel with battlements — watches the valley; all around stretch the high moors of the Hohes Venn, borderland wilderness toward Belgium.

Summer brings the town's grandest sound: the Monschau Klassik open-air festival stages opera and symphonic nights in the castle courtyard, fireworks over slate roofs included. The mustard mill still grinds its historic recipes; Christmas turns the lanes into candlelit theatre. Monschau's fortune is to have been forgotten at the right moment — and remembered, now, for exactly that.