Wiesloch

Wiesloch sold the world's first tank of fuel. When Bertha Benz made her clandestine long-distance drive in August 1888 — proving her husband's Patent-Motorwagen by taking it from Mannheim to Pforzheim — she replenished its ligroin at the Stadtapotheke here: the town pharmacy thereby entered history as the first filling station on earth, a monument beside it and the Bertha Benz Memorial Route through town making Wiesloch a station of automotive pilgrimage, the pharmacy still dispensing on the spot.

Wine is the older trade: Wiesloch's slopes belong to Baden's vineyards, its historic Winzerkeller among the region's great cooperative cellars, and the Kraichgau's "land of a thousand hills" begins at the town's edge with cycling routes through vines and hollow ways. The old town gathers around St Laurentius and the market's gables; history's sterner note sounds from 1622, when the battle of Wiesloch opened the Palatinate campaigns of the Thirty Years' War on the surrounding fields.

The present works in software's shadow and its own light: SAP's Walldorf towers adjoin the shared station, a modern congress forum and the Palatin hotel-culture complex host seasons of concerts and conferences, and quarry lakes and the Leimbach's parks supply the pauses. A pharmacy that fuelled the future, cellars that age the past: Wiesloch's tanks and casks both run full.