Ingolstadt is a pleasant city on the banks of the Danube, half way between the big city tourist destinations of Munich and Nuremburg. Despite its riverside location it attracts far fewer visitors than its neighbours, or indeed some of the similarly sized but much more architecturally significant Bavarian cities such as Würzburg or Augsburg.

Admittedly its location isn’t on the most scenic stretch of the river, unlike Regensburg or even Passau, but Ingolstadt has three big claims to fame that should ensure its lasting legacy.

First it is the home of Audi, the third of the famous car marques that call southern Germany home. Less well known than the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart or BMW Welt in Munich, Audi has its own visitor centre at the Group HQ in Ingolstadt, the Audi Forum, which attracts 400,000 visitors a year. It offers both tours of its production facilities and there is the Audi Museum Mobile, charting the development of the company and its cars.

Unlike its competitors, the presence of the firm in Bavaria is something of an accident, a legacy of the historical settlement that concluded World War II. Before the war, Auto Union had its headquarters in the Soviet zone, but following the expropriation of the company’s plants in occupied Chemnitz and Zwickau by the authorities, the newly-named Audi relocated to Ingolstadt and has been there ever since.

The importance of Audi to the local economy cannot be overstated. It employs over 40,000 people and either directly (or through its supplier network) accounts for over 50 percent of regional output. Ingolstadt now has a third railway station, Ingolstadt Audi, a €15m joint project with Audi and Deutsche Bahn, which allows 3,000 daily commuters to get to their place of work more conveniently.

Frankenstein’s monster

Ingolstadt’s second big claim to fame is its lasting place in the pantheon of horror fiction as the literal birthplace of Frankenstein’s Monster. Touring southern Germany in 1818, Mary Shelley decided to use the University of Ingolstadt, and its well known scientific research centre, as the setting for the young scientist Viktor Frankenstein’s decision to create a new animate creature.

The city operates a Frankenstein tour through the Altstadt, calling at locations which feature in the original novel, and makes good use of its setting as the location of one of the most enduring stories in European fiction.

Finally, Bavaria is synonymous with beer, and the first ever laws governing food safety, in this case regarding the ingredients that were permitted in the brewing of beer. Duke William IV proclaimed, in Ingolstadt in 1516, that beer could only be brewed with barley, hops and water. Initially this was the Bavarian Purity Law but it soon came to apply to the whole of the country.

Despite some tinkering to allow for brewing with wheat etc, those essential three ingredients remain at the core of the German beer industry, and brewers still proudly state that their beers adhere to the Reinheitsgebot of 1516.

So instead of passing through Ingolstadt en route to Munich from Nuremburg, it’s worth stopping off to consider the lasting effects that the city has had on European industry and culture.  – Mark Arrol

It may end up as the longest river in continental Europe, but the Danube starts small at a spring in the heart of the small Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, and doesn’t become navigable until the city of Ulm, a distance of roughly 200km. Accordingly this first stretch of stripling waterway does not figure widely in tour operator brochures, which tend to focus on big river cruises, and yet it is one of the prettiest waterside routes in Germany, ideal for cycling.

Donaueschingen is a handsome little place, and its celebrated Danube (Donau) spring bubbles out of the ground between the town’s palace and its brewery. These days it has been railed in to make a little pool surrounded with balustrades which tourists treat as a wishing well, throwing coins into the water.

After just 20 km it vanishes completely

Shadowed by the cycle route which goes all the way to Budapest, the river sets off full of hope, initially through parkland and water meadows, but then after just 20 km it vanishes completely near the village of Immendingen into an underground system of watercourses, leaving behind a weedy, puddled riverbed which only really flows during seasons of heavy rain and melting snow.

Fortunately this weedy bed is slowly refilled by tributaries, and then for the next 30 kilometres the re-born river wanders mazily through lovely pastoral landscape of fruit orchards and cattle grazing, burrowing through a limestone gorge in the southernmost skirts of the Swabian Alb. A lot of the riverbank land hereabouts is owned by the very prosperous Benedictine abbey at Beuron, with its fabulously decorated baroque church, and abbey produce – particularly meat – on sale in abbey shops.

Beuron is the first of several major abbeys that line the river, and the next town, Sigmaringen, is the setting for its first major castle, a Hohenzollern property stuck dramatically up on a riverside rock, where the Nazi-controlled French Vichy government was incarcerated during the Second World War.

At the next, very pretty, town of Riedlingen, whose main square is lined with ancient, slightly wonky, half-timbered and gabled houses, there’s a choice of routes: sticking to the river for the straight run into Ulm, or diverting up the Ach valley to the resort town of Blaubeuren, where the river Blau emerges dramatically from a giant hole in the ground.

The Blau meets the Danube at Ulm, the first big city on the Danube, whose cathedral has the tallest church spire in Europe at 161 metres. From Ulm downriver there are more castles, monasteries and notable cities, but now that the river is navigable, mainstream tourism kicks in. Upstream of Ulm a river-following cyclist is in his or her own world; below Ulm, he or she will begin to meet up with others, and then from Passau, to blend with the crowds.

Plenty of organisations (see our Tour Operator pages) offer packages along the Danube Cyclepath (Donau Radweg), but route finding is a doddle, and there are plenty of bike-friendly guest houses, so it is just as easy to organise it yourself. A handy guide is The Danube Cycleway, published by Cicerone.

Andrew Eames’s book about travelling the Danube, Blue River Black Sea, is available from Amazon.