Siegburg

Siegburg gave opera its gingerbread house. Engelbert Humperdinck, composer of "Hänsel und Gretel", was born here in 1854 — the town honours him in street, school and museum room, and the world's most beloved fairy-tale opera carries a Siegburg birth certificate into every Christmas season. It suits a town whose skyline is itself storybook: the Michaelsberg rises straight from the market square, crowned by the Benedictine abbey that Archbishop Anno of Cologne founded in 1064 — the saint of the medieval "Annolied" lies enshrined here, and the abbey's silhouette, now a church institution's seat, remains the emblem over the roofs.

The town's medieval export was fired clay: Siegburg stoneware, the pale salt-glazed jugs and drinking vessels of the potters' quarter, travelled Europe's trade routes and now fills museum cases from London to Cologne — the city museum on the market keeps masterworks at the source, alongside the story of mills, pilgrims and Rhineland trade on the Sieg.

The present is well connected and well attended: the ICE station puts Frankfurt and Cologne minutes away, the market square's cafés fill daily, and December brings the celebrated medieval Christmas market, when smiths, minstrels and mulled-wine smoke restore the Middle Ages below the abbey. A saint on the hill, jugs in the cases, an opera in the cradle: Siegburg's legends harmonise.