Wernigerode

Few towns reward an aimless wander the way Wernigerode does. You turn off the main square into a side lane and the timber-framed houses lean in close on both sides, painted in ochre and dove-grey and burnt orange, every beam crooked in its own particular way. A castle floats on the wooded hill above, the cobbles climb and dip underfoot, and somewhere in the distance the Harz mountains rise green and blue. It is the kind of place where the photographs take themselves and the half-day you planned quietly becomes a whole one.

Wernigerode sits at the northern foot of the Harz, the upland range that fills the middle of Germany with forest, granite tors and walking trails. That position has given the town its nickname, "the colourful town in the Harz", and it earns it. Because the centre came through the centuries — and the Second World War — almost untouched, the old streets survive as a near-complete medieval and early-modern townscape rather than a single showpiece building marooned among newer ones. The pleasure here is cumulative: house after house after house, each leaning a little differently than the last. Wernigerode can be visited as a daytrip from Quedlinburg or Goslar, or as a base for the wider Harz.

Streets of the Old Town

Start where the locals do, on the residential lanes just off the centre. Streets like Hinterstraße and the alleys around the Oberpfarrkirchhof are lined with modest artisans' houses, their fronts a patchwork of exposed oak frames and infill panels. Doors are painted in deep reds and forest greens, window boxes spill over, and a single rosebush will often soften a whole facade. There are no grand intentions in these streets — they were simply where people lived and worked — and that is exactly why they feel so unforced.

The Castle on the Hill

Wherever you walk in the old town, the castle keeps appearing between rooftops and at the ends of streets. Schloss Wernigerode crowns a spur of the Agnesberg directly above the centre, a romantic pile of turrets, steep slate roofs and pale sandstone walls that looks, from below, almost too theatrical to be real. Its silhouette — one tall square tower flanked by a cluster of sharp witch's-hat spires — is the image most visitors carry away.

You can climb up on foot in twenty minutes or so along a shaded path, or take the little Bimmelbahn road-train that trundles up from the town. Either way the reward is the same: a terrace with one of the best views in the northern Harz, looking back over the red roofs of the old town toward the hills. Inside, the castle is laid out as a museum of 19th-century princely life, room after room furnished in heavy dark wood, patterned wallpaper and gilt — a panelled dining room, a chapel, a study lined with books, a great hall hung with portraits. It is worth the entry for the contrast alone, the cool dim interiors against the bright slate-roofed exterior, though for many people the building's setting and approach are the real attraction, and simply circling the walls and lingering on the terrace is enough.

Walls, Gardens and the Edge of the Old Town

The town once sat behind defensive walls, and stretches of them survive on the quieter fringes of the centre. The nicest way to find them is to follow the path that runs below the old wall on the town's southern side, where a narrow cobbled lane threads between the stonework and the backs of houses. In early summer the verges froth with cow parsley and wild roses, a wrought-iron lamp marks the bend, and the rooftops climb away above you. It is a five-minute detour that most day-trippers never make, and all the better for it.

This is also where the town's mixed textures come through most clearly — rough fieldstone at the base of the wall, warm red sandstone in the arches, half-timber and tile above. Wernigerode is a town of materials as much as of colours, and the older you go toward the perimeter, the more those layers show.

The Carved House and the Lanes of the Centre

Back in the heart of the old town, the Breite Straße and the streets around it hold the showpiece houses, the ones merchants built to be seen. The most extraordinary is the Krummelsches Haus, a tall Baroque townhouse whose entire front is covered in dense wooden carving — figures, foliage, coats of arms and scrollwork worked into every panel between the windows. Stand across the street and let your eye travel up it; there is more invention in this one facade than in many whole towns.

From here the lanes pull you on. Window displays of marzipan and Harz souvenirs, a café spilling chairs onto the cobbles, a bakery's smell drifting out of an open door — the centre is compact enough that you are never more than a few minutes from the square, and tangled enough that you keep finding streets you missed.

The shopping here is part of the pleasure, and refreshingly local. Confectioners sell marzipan shaped into fruits and figures, and the Harz speciality shops are stacked with the things the region is known for — Schierker Feuerstein herbal liqueur, jars of forest honey, carved wooden figures and the little witches that nod to the Brocken's Walpurgis Night legends. You will find traditional Bratwurst and Thüringer sausages grilling at stalls, bakeries selling Baumkuchen, and small galleries and bookshops tucked into ground floors that have been trading for centuries. It is the kind of centre where browsing and wandering are the same activity.

The Market Square and the Rathaus

Everything in Wernigerode leads, sooner or later, to the Marktplatz. The square is wide, paved, and ringed with gabled houses, with café terraces along one side and a fountain at its centre. On a bright day it has the easy, sociable feel of a town that knows it is good-looking, people drifting across it with ice creams, others sitting out with coffee under the awnings.

The building that commands the square is the Rathaus, the town hall, and it is one of the most photographed in Germany. Its front is a riot of dark timber and pale infill, carved consoles and oriel windows, and above it rise two slender, pointed turrets capped with weathervanes — a fairy-tale outline that has become the town's emblem. A broad external stair climbs to the entrance, and the carved figures along the facade reward a slow look. Beside it stands the ornate market fountain, gilded and painted, with the coats of arms of the town's notable families. Across the square, the white-and-timber Gothisches Haus, now a hotel, completes one of the most harmonious civic ensembles you will find anywhere.

Views, Gateways and Quiet Corners

For all its compactness, Wernigerode is a town of long views. Climb a little — toward the castle, or up one of the streets that rise out of the centre — and the rooftops fall away to reveal the Harz proper, ridge upon wooded ridge, with the dome of the Brocken, the range's highest summit, often visible on the skyline. It is a reminder that the town is a gateway as much as a destination: the start of forest walks, of the narrow-gauge steam railway that climbs to the Brocken, of the whole upland behind it.

That railway is an attraction in its own right. The Harz narrow-gauge lines run real steam locomotives from a station near the centre of Wernigerode, and the Brocken service hauls its carriages slowly up through forest and open moorland to the 1,141-metre summit, smoke streaming past the windows the whole way. Even if you do not ride to the top, it is worth being on the platform when a locomotive comes in, hissing and dripping, to see a working piece of the 19th century still earning its keep. For walkers, the same lines give easy access to trailheads deeper in the Harz, making the town a natural base for a day or two in the hills.

The castle approach has its own quieter pleasures. The lane up passes old stone gateways and outbuildings, sandstone arches with timber gates, ivy climbing the walls — a different register from the polished centre, working and weathered, and especially atmospheric on a still grey morning or under a dusting of winter snow.

And then there are the side streets that lead nowhere in particular — a cobbled lane curving gently between two rows of leaning houses, a single red car parked against the kerb, not another soul in sight. These are the corners that stay with you after the famous views fade. Wernigerode at its best is not the postcard from the square but the empty street ten minutes' walk away, where the timbers buckle and the cobbles shine and the town simply gets on with being itself.

Come back to the Marktplatz at the end of the day, when the light goes gold and the crowds thin, and the Rathaus turrets stand sharp against a deepening blue sky with the fountain glowing beside them. It is the same view you saw at midday, and somehow an entirely different one. Wernigerode is a town that asks only that you slow down and look — and then keeps giving you reasons to.