Pirmasens

Pirmasens marched into the shoe business. Landgrave Ludwig IX of Hesse-Darmstadt made the remote Palatinate hill town his garrison caprice in the eighteenth century, drilling regiments of giant grenadiers on its parade grounds; when the soldier-landgrave died in 1790 and the garrison dissolved, the soldiers' families turned their sideline — sewing shoes — into the town's destiny. Within a century Pirmasens was the shoe metropolis of Germany: hundreds of factories booting the nation, an international shoe fair, and a self-made industrial city on seven hills proud of smelling of leather.

The industry has slimmed but not vanished — premium makers and the trade's institutes remain, and the town curates the heritage with flair: the Rheinberger, a giant former shoe factory, now houses the Dynamikum, the Palatinate's hands-on science centre, and the Forum Alte Post, the splendid sandstone imperial post office, shows art including the sardonic hometown painter Heinrich Bürkel's Biedermeier scenes. Broad stairways — the Schlossstufen cascading where the landgrave's palace stood — give the hill city its Mediterranean gesture.

At the door lies the reward for every march: the Palatinate Forest and the Wasgau's red sandstone country, castle rocks and table mountains from Trifels toward Alsace, Germany's largest continuous forest offering the trails on which, naturally, the local industry tests its hiking boots. Grenadiers, lasts and long walks: Pirmasens still sets out well shod.