Freiburg

Right now in Freiburg (as of October 2026)

• Münster tower in winter: The top gallery is closed during the winter months. You can still climb as far as the Türmerstube, the tower keeper's room.
• Choir ambulatory: It can close at short notice for liturgy or renovation.

How long to stay?

Worth a rest day. The Münster alone fills half a day: the tower, the choir with its ring of chapels, the hunt for the St James relief and, if you are here on a Saturday, the tour of the cathedral workshop. In the morning the market around the Münster is worth a visit. On top of that, Freiburg is a junction: this is where you decide whether to head west over the Rhine into Alsace or south through the Markgräflerland towards Basel.

Freiburg in Ninja numbers

• 116 metres is the height of the west tower, finished around 1330. It is the only Gothic church tower within today's Germany that was completed in the Middle Ages.
• 209 steps take you up to the Türmerstube, for €5 (as of October 2026). After a day with a backpack, these are the most honest metres of climbing all week.
• 91 gargoyles hang on the Münster, each one different. They were meant to drain rainwater and keep evil spirits away.
• 136.9 kilometres separate you from Héricourt at the Burgundian Gate, according to Camino Ninja, and 95.8 kilometres from Basel.

Arriving: two routes, one Münster

You reach Freiburg on two Camino routes. On the Camino Rottenburg – Freiburg – Héricourt you come down the Elz valley, from Waldkirch via Denzlingen and Gundelfingen, 17.7 kilometres according to Camino Ninja. On the Himmelreich-Jakobusweg you come from the east out of the Höllental, via Himmelreich, Kirchzarten and Zarten through the Dreisam valley, 18.7 kilometres from Himmelreich according to Camino Ninja. A signposted variant runs over the Lindenberg.

Both routes lead straight to the Münster. Here the Himmelreich route turns from east–west to north–south, and the route from Rottenburg leaves the Black Forest for the Rhine plain.

In brief: a city around its Münster

Around 1200 Duke Berthold V of Zähringen had the Münster begun in Romanesque style; from about 1230 building continued in Gothic. Construction took more than three hundred years, and many of those who paid for it never saw it finished. On the night of 27 November 1944 an air raid destroyed almost all the houses around Münsterplatz. The Münster stayed standing.

It has been a cathedral since 1827. That year the Archdiocese of Freiburg was newly established, after the old diocese of Konstanz had been dissolved in 1821. If you walked to Lake Constance on the Upper Swabian or the Linzgau route, you already know the old bishops' city.

The most beautiful tower on earth

In 1869 the Basel art historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote the sentence Freiburg still quotes today: „Und Freiburg wird wohl der schönste Turm auf Erden bleiben.“ – Freiburg will probably remain the most beautiful tower on earth. Its spire was the first completely openwork spire of the Gothic period, and many churches in Europe took it as their model.

For you as a pilgrim it has another side: you walk towards it for half a day, whether you come down the Elz valley or the Dreisam valley.

Around the Münster: what to see

Almost everything that matters to pilgrims in Freiburg is at or inside the Münster. Allow for the lunch breaks and don't come during a service, when visits are not possible.

• The St James relief: In the Nikolauskapelle of the Münster, a relief from around 1220 shows St James crowning pilgrims. For a pilgrim this is probably the most beautiful image in the whole Münster: the apostle welcoming those who are on their way to him. Open for visits on weekdays from 9:00 with a lunch break, on Sundays from 13:30 (as of October 2026).
• The Münster tower: 209 steps take you up to the Türmerstube, where you also buy your ticket, cash or card. Open Monday to Saturday 11:00 to 16:00, Sundays and holidays 13:00 to 17:00, last ascent about a quarter of an hour before closing. Adults pay €5 (as of October 2026). The climb is not step-free. The tower holds the Hosanna bell, around 750 years old and weighing three tonnes, one of the oldest Angelus bells in Germany.
• Choir and ring of chapels: A visit costs €2 (as of October 2026) and has its own, shorter opening hours, on weekdays from 10:00 with a lunch break. It can close at short notice.
• The Münsterbauhütte: The cathedral workshop looks after the upkeep of the Münster. On Saturdays at 13:00 a 45-minute tour takes you through its workshop, for €6 (as of October 2026), meeting point at the Münsterladen, Herrenstraße 30. Anyone who is currently working on something big, step by step, every day, will understand these people well.
• Münsterplatz: The market takes place around the Münster on every working day, with 80 to 180 stalls. On the square stand the Historisches Kaufhaus and the Wentzingerhaus, both of which survived the 1944 raid.

Food and drink

The Münster market is where you stock up for the next day and have breakfast on the spot. It takes place on every working day; only on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, does the square stay empty. We haven't found reliable pilgrim tips for individual places to eat, and we don't do advertising.

Honestly

• Freiburg is expensive. On the route from Rottenburg to Héricourt it is the most expensive place to stay. We haven't found a pilgrim hostel with a dormitory. Book early.
• The Münster takes breaks. At midday and during services you can't visit. If you arrive around noon, you'll have to wait.
• The way west is no forest path. Between Freiburg and Ensisheim you walk a long way along roads, fields and the Rhine lateral canal. If you want quiet, you're better off on the Himmelreich route heading south.
• Coming from the Höllental is noisy. Between Titisee-Neustadt and Freiburg the Himmelreich route runs within earshot of the B31 in places.

Where pilgrims sleep

There is no real pilgrim hostel in Freiburg, and along the Himmelreich route classic pilgrim hostels are the exception too. These are the budget options:

• Jugendherberge Freiburg: the youth hostel at Kartäuserstraße 151, in the east of the city.
• Black Forest Hostel: at Kartäuserstraße 33, closer to the old town. A dorm bed costs from €24 (as of October 2026).

In the app you'll also find private hosts who don't rent through booking platforms. Ask them directly about their terms.

Ninja tips

• Stamp at the c-punkt: You get your stamp at the c-punkt Münsterforum, Herrenstraße 33, right by the Münster.
• Look for St James in the Nikolauskapelle: The relief dates from around 1220 and shows St James crowning pilgrims. It is not the first thing visitors look for in the Münster, but for you it is the most important.
• Tower before 16:00: On weekdays it closes at 16:00, and the last ascent is a quarter of an hour earlier. So don't leave the Dreisam valley too late.
• The originals from Himmelreich: If you came along the Himmelreich route, you saw copies in the St James chapel. The St James figure from about 1580 and the Pietà from about 1480 are in the Augustinermuseum. We haven't found opening hours.
• Read the waymark correctly: On the way to Héricourt there is no arrow showing the direction, but a yellow ray symbol on a blue background. Where the rays converge, the route continues.
• KONUS guest card: Overnight guests in around 150 Black Forest towns ride buses and trains free of charge between Pforzheim and Basel with it, Freiburg's trams included. Ask at check-in whether your accommodation issues it.

Practical tips for pilgrims

• Pilgrim passport: For the Himmelreich route, it's best to order it online in advance from the association. In Freiburg you get your stamp at the c-punkt.
• Visiting the Münster: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 9:00 to 11:45 and 12:30 to 16:45, on Wednesday afternoons only from 13:00, Saturdays 9:00 to 11:00 and 12:15 to 18:00, Sundays and holidays 13:30 to 19:30 (as of October 2026). For prayer it is open longer, on weekdays from 6:30.
• Guided tour: The open Münster tour starts Monday to Saturday at 14:00 at the c-punkt, about an hour, €8 (as of October 2026).
• Getting here and away: Freiburg has a mainline railway station. The nearest airport is EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg.

Onward: over the Rhine or through the vineyards

On the Camino Rottenburg – Freiburg – Héricourt you head west through the Breisgau. Via Schallstadt (9.3 kilometres according to Camino Ninja) and Munzingen you reach Grezhausen on the Rhine after 21.7 kilometres; there are also beds in nearby Hartheim. After that you cross the Rhine at Fessenheim into Alsace. From Freiburg on, the walking is almost flat.

On the Himmelreich-Jakobusweg you head south, via Merzhausen and Ebringen into the vineyards of the Batzenberg. After 18 kilometres according to Camino Ninja you are in Kirchhofen. The next day St. Cyriak in Sulzburg awaits, a church consecrated in 993.

Deep dive: A tower, a market and a night in November

A long read, in case you want to learn more about Freiburg. About twenty-five minutes' reading.

A tower you walk towards

Some cities you only notice once you are standing in the middle of them. Freiburg is not one of them. Whichever of the two Camino routes brings you here, you see your goal for half a day before you arrive. Whether you come from the Elztal or from the Dreisamtal, you are walking towards the same tower. It is 116 metres high, built of sandstone, and at the very top it is made not of walls but of air and tracery. You can see right through it.

This tower is the thread that runs through this story. It was already standing when the town bought its freedom from its counts. It was standing when Emperor Maximilian the First held an imperial diet here, when Erasmus of Rotterdam fled here from Basel to escape the Reformation, when the plague killed a quarter of the inhabitants and when only a fraction of the citizens were left after the Thirty Years' War. And it was still standing when, on one night in November 1944, almost everything around it went up in flames.

So you are arriving in a city that has never lost its centre. That is rarer than you might think.

A market on the edge of the Black Forest

At the beginning there is no legend of lights or saints, but a business plan. In 1120 two brothers from the House of Zähringen, Duke Berthold the Third and his younger brother Konrad, founded a town on this spot. It was meant as a free market town, and the name still sounds like it: Freiburg, the free borough. Konrad, who succeeded his brother as duke in 1122, later became rector of Burgundy. He died in Konstanz in 1152 and lies in the family vault at the abbey of Sankt Peter in the Black Forest.

Water was flowing through the lanes from the first decades. Some archaeologists think it possible that the Bächle, the little water channels you trip over today, were laid out as early as around 1120. They are only documented in writing a hundred years later. We will come back to them.

The young town grew rich thanks to the mountain to the south. Silver was mined on the Schauinsland, and the silver made Freiburg wealthy. In 1327 the town minted its own coin, the Rappenpfennig, and in 1377 it joined a monetary union. A large part of what you admire on the Münster today was paid for with this silver from the Black Forest.

Citizens against counts

In 1218 Duke Berthold the Fifth, the last of the Zähringen, died without heirs. Rule over Freiburg passed to Egino of Urach, who from then on called himself Count of Freiburg. It was the start of a century in which town and lord did not trust each other.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century Count Egino the Second raised taxes and curtailed the citizens' freedoms. The people of Freiburg answered in their own way: they destroyed the count's castle on the Schlossberg, with catapults, as the town's history records. From this period comes a story that Freiburg likes to tell. A butcher named Hauri is said to have killed the Bishop of Strasbourg on 29 July 1299. Whether it happened that way cannot be said for certain; it is a tradition. What is certain is that the town afterwards paid the counts three hundred marks of silver every year, until 1368.

In that year the people of Freiburg bought their freedom. They paid off their counts and placed themselves under the protection of the Habsburgs. For more than four centuries Freiburg now remained Habsburg. Within the town, power shifted too. The old patrician families, above all the Schnewlin, lost influence, and by around 1389 the guilds were stronger than the patricians. Keep the guilds in mind. You will meet them again shortly in the Münster, in glass.

A tomb for the last Zähringen

The Münster began as a burial church. Around 1200 Duke Berthold the Fifth had a new parish church built that was also to be his resting place. The church stood partly on the foundations of an older building from the founding years around 1120. Work began in the Romanesque style. The tomb figure of Berthold that you find in the Münster today is, however, younger than the man himself. It was only made in the middle of the fourteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death.

Around 1230 the style changed, and building continued in Gothic. The construction of the whole Münster stretched over more than three hundred years. Whoever laid the foundation stone did not live to see it finished, and neither did their grandchildren.

It is easy to forget this when you stand in front of a finished building. Almost nobody who worked on this Münster saw it complete. Stonemasons carved figures for a church that only their great-grandchildren would enter. If you are walking a small section of a very long way every day right now, without knowing what it will be like at the end, you may understand these people better than most visitors.

For a long time the Münster was not a cathedral in the proper sense. In the Middle Ages Freiburg belonged to the Diocese of Konstanz, and the bishop sat on Lake Constance. Only in 1827 did the Münster become the seat of the newly founded Archdiocese of Freiburg, after the old Diocese of Konstanz had been dissolved in 1821. Since then the Zähringen parish church has been a bishop's church.

The most beautiful tower on earth

The west tower was finished around 1330. That makes it the only Gothic church tower within Germany's present-day borders to be completed in the Middle Ages. Strasbourg has a similarly early tower, but Strasbourg is in France today.

When you stand in front of it, read it from bottom to top. The base is almost square, massive and closed. Above it lies a twelve-sided star gallery. From there the tower becomes octagonal and slimmer. In an essay on the tower, Emil Spath interpreted the octagon as a sign of the Resurrection. And above the octagon begins what made the tower famous: the spire. Eight stone ribs converge upwards, with fields of openwork tracery between them, and at the very top sits a finial. It was the first fully openwork spire of the Gothic age. Many churches in Europe later imitated it.

Spath also gives the old measurement. The tower measures 210 Freiburg ells, by his calculation a little over 113 metres. The medieval master builders did not reckon in metres but in ells and feet, and the Münster was planned in these old units.

In 1869 the Basel art historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote the sentence that has been attached to every Freiburg city guide ever since: „Und Freiburg wird wohl der schönste Turm auf Erden bleiben.“ And Freiburg will surely remain the most beautiful tower on earth. Not all the neighbours agree. Four daily stages further west, in Thann in Alsace, they have their own saying: Strasbourg has the highest tower, Freiburg the most massive, Thann the most beautiful. You will see both towers and can decide for yourself.

The bells hang in the tower, nineteen ringable bells weighing around 25 tonnes together, one of the largest peals in Germany. The oldest is called Hosanna. It was cast on 18 July 1258 and weighs more than three tonnes. It is one of the oldest Angelus bells in Germany and still rings at special times: on Thursday evenings after the Angelus, on Saturday evenings, on Fridays at 11:00, when the people of Freiburg call it the Spätzleglocke, and every year on 27 November. You will find out why on that day further below. Another bell, by the way, bears the name Jakobus. It weighs 803 kilograms. If you are up on the tower when the bells ring, your apostle may well be joining in.

A Bible in stone in the porch

Before you go into the Münster, stop in the tower porch. The figures around you were made between 1270 and 1290, and some of them were carved from the same stone blocks as the tower itself and set in place as it was built. The art historian Hermann Althaus called the porch a Bible of the poor, a Bible for people who could not read.

It is meant to be read from bottom to top. At the bottom it is about the Incarnation, in the middle Mary stands at the central pillar as intercessor, above that come the Passion, the raising of the dead and the Archangel Michael weighing souls. Then there is the procession of the blessed and the damned. At the very top sit apostles and prophets, and above them the risen Christ.

On the walls stand the wise and foolish virgins from the parable: the first with their oil, the others with empty lamps. Next to them are the Church and the Synagogue, the Synagogue with a broken staff, a motif that shows the medieval disparagement of Judaism and that should be named as such today. And there is Frau Welt, Lady World. From the front she is a beautiful, seductive woman. Walk around her and you see her back, which is full of snakes and creatures. The message needed no explanation in the thirteenth century, and it needs none today.

These figures were once colourful, much more colourful than you see them now. They were repainted from 1603 to 1609 and again from 1887 to 1889. The restoration Hermann Althaus reported on in 2004 took about five years and cost around two million euros. The restorers worked by the principle „Erhalten statt Erneuern“, preserve rather than replace, with scalpel and brush, and they found that the original colours had been considerably stronger than all the later repaintings.

On the Münster itself you will also find something very worldly. Since the Middle Ages the prescribed sizes for loaves of bread have been displayed on its walls. God and daily bread were only a few steps apart here.

Light from the workshops

When you step into the nave, the light falls through coloured glass. Many of the nave windows were donated by Freiburg's guilds, and the guilds immortalised themselves in them. In the windows you see their guild emblems. Some windows still bear the names of trades today: there is a shoemakers' window, a smiths' window, a coopers' window and a painters' window. Remember the year 1389, when the guilds became more powerful than the patricians. In these windows you can see what that meant: craftsmen proud enough to hang their coats of arms in the church, right next to the saints.

Several of the windows date from around 1320. Some of the red panes hold a special secret. Their deep colour comes not from a dye but from tiny particles of gold suspended in the glass.

That these windows are still here today is thanks to a man hardly any visitor knows. Before the great air raid of 1944, church staff led by Monsignor Max Fauler had the windows removed. So they survived the night of the bombing undamaged.

The windows have been restored again and again. Fritz Geiges worked on them between 1917 and 1927 and added some things that had no historical basis. In 1979 Rüdiger Becksmann of the Corpus Vitrearum described how, in the new conservation work, a distinction was made between what is medieval and what comes from Geiges.

Saint James in the Münster

As a pilgrim it is worth looking for Saint James in the Münster, because he is there several times, and nowhere loudly.

In the Nikolauskapelle there is a relief from around 1220. It shows Saint James, and he is crowning pilgrims. That is an unusual image. Medieval depictions mostly show the apostle himself as a pilgrim, with hat, staff and shell, or as a knight on horseback. Here, though, he stands as one who honours those who arrive. The relief is almost as old as the Gothic parts of the Münster itself, made at a time when Berthold the Fifth had just died and the church was still being built in the Romanesque style.

In the smiths' window, made around 1320, there is a medallion in which Saint James blesses a pilgrim. Becksmann describes it in his report of 1979. So of all places, it is in the window named after the smiths that the pilgrims' apostle appears. Whether that was a deliberate connection, we do not know. But it is a nice thought when you stand in front of it on tired feet.

And in the tower, as mentioned, hangs the bell called Jakobus.

But Saint James had another place in Freiburg, outside the walls. In the Gutleuthaus, the house for lepers that the people of Freiburg called the Siechen an dem Felde, the sick in the field, the chapel was consecrated in 1268. The man who consecrated it was Albertus Magnus, one of the great scholars of the Middle Ages and teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He dedicated the high altar to the Mother of God and to Saint James, the patron saint of the house. That is how the historian Bernadette Kuner tells it in her study of the Gutleuthaus. Saint James as patron of the outcasts, of those who were not allowed into the town: that too is part of his image.

The choir that took almost two hundred years

A good twenty years after the tower was completed, something new began at the other end of the Münster: a large choir modelled on the French cathedrals, with a long high choir, an ambulatory and a ring of thirteen chapels.

The foundation stone was laid on 24 March 1354. You can still read the inscription today on the northern choir portal, the Creation Portal. The first documented master builder is Johannes von Gmünd, a member of the Parler family, the dynasty of builders whose members also worked on Saint Vitus Cathedral in Prague, Cologne Cathedral and Ulm Minster.

Then the money ran out. Around 1379 and 1380 the work stalled, and it took almost a hundred years before it really went on. Only in 1471 did Hans Niesenberger from Graz take up the work again. Hans Niederländer completed the high choir in 1513, and Wolf Koch finished the ring of chapels in 1536. So 182 years passed between the foundation stone and the last chapel.

A new choir needed a new high altar. The commission went to Hans Baldung, known as Grien, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer. While he worked on it, he lived in Freiburg from 1512 to 1517. The work, completed in 1516, consists of eleven panels. When the altar is open you see the Coronation of the Virgin: Mary on the throne, Christ and God the Father holding a crown above her, angels all around. The twelve apostles stand on the wings. Closed, the altar shows four scenes from the life of Mary, because the Münster is dedicated to her.

The finest part, though, is hidden on the back. There Baldung painted the Crucifixion, and behind the cross, in a red cap, he painted himself. His hand rests on the shoulder of a young man whose chest bears Baldung's monogram. On the predella of the back the four patrons are depicted: Aegidius Haas, Sebastian von Blumenegg, Ulrich Wirtner and Nikolaus Scheffer. Baldung received 340 Rhenish florins and a further 250 in instalments. Not all art historians liked the altar. Fritz Baumgarten accused Baldung's angels of disturbing the heavenly silence. You can decide for yourself whether a little unrest in heaven is so bad.

In one of the chapels there is also an altar by Hans Holbein the Younger. And during Lent a huge Lenten cloth hangs in the Münster, restored and backed in 2003. Today it weighs more than a tonne and has to be moved with heavy machinery.

Pilgrims on the way to Freiburg

In the Middle Ages Freiburg was not a major pilgrim stop like Le Puy or Vézelay. That has to be said honestly. Gottfried Wiedemer from Offenburg writes in an essay on the Camino routes along the Upper Rhine that pilgrims on the Upper Rhine mainly used the route on the left bank, which had been better developed since Roman times. But that pilgrims to Santiago also travelled on the right bank, through the Breisgau, can be inferred from the council minutes of Baden and Freiburg from the sixteenth century.

The most beautiful trace lies east of the city, where the Höllental opens out. In the hamlet of Himmelreich, whose name means kingdom of heaven, stood a chapel of Saint James, built before 1500 and first documented in 1590. It is regarded as the last stop before Freiburg for pilgrims to Santiago from the Swabian and Bavarian lands. Picture these people: they came down the gorge of the Höllental, a descent of around 800 metres, stopped at a chapel called Himmelreich and then walked through the Dreisamtal towards the tower. The chapel had to make way for the widening of the federal road in 1963 and was rebuilt in 1986 in the garden of the Hofgut Himmelreich. The original figure of Saint James from around 1580 and a Pietà from about 1480 are now in the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg.

In the town itself there was care for strangers and the poor. The most important house was the Heiliggeistspital, the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, between the Münster and today's Kaiser-Joseph-Straße, whose rules of 1318 have survived. Alongside it there was an Elendenherberge. In the Middle Ages the German word elend did not mean misery but foreign, abroad, far from home. An Elendenherberge was therefore a house for people who were not from here. Whether pilgrims to Santiago slept there is not documented in detail, but such houses were built for exactly people like them.

We have not found the names of medieval Santiago pilgrims from Freiburg in the sources. One name from the neighbourhood has come down to us: from Leinstetten, which today lies on the Camino from Rottenburg to Freiburg, a man named Hans Marx set off for Santiago in 1550. Which route he took, nobody knows.

Today's routes are young, and they say so openly. The route through the Elztal via Freiburg was set up in 2007. The Himmelreich-Jakobusweg was founded in 2009, on Saint James's Day, at the Hofgut Himmelreich, a business where people with and without disabilities work together. It was blessed in 2010, and since 2016 there has also been a version for wheelchairs and walkers. The line is new; there is no medieval document for the route. But the chapel is real, and the relief in the Münster is real, and you walk over the same ground.

A university for the Habsburg lands

In 1457 Freiburg gained what still shapes it today: a university. It was founded by Archduke Albert the Sixth of Austria, who gave it land, revenues and its own jurisdiction. The university was also a church institution, with a papal privilege, with the Bishop of Basel as chancellor and the Bishop of Konstanz as patron. It is one of the oldest universities in the German-speaking world. It has borne its present name, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, since 1820. At that time Grand Duke Ludwig the First of Baden saved it with an annual grant, and his name was added to the title out of gratitude.

Forty years after its founding, the Empire came to Freiburg. In 1498 Emperor Maximilian the First held an imperial diet here. For the assembly the Kornhaus was built on the Münsterplatz, intended as a hall for dances and festivities. But it was probably not finished in time, and so the diet met in the old Gerichtslaube behind the old town hall. On the south side of the square stands the Historisches Kaufhaus, first mentioned in 1378 and completed in 1532.

In 1529 a refugee came to the town, the most famous scholar of his age. The Reformation had prevailed in Basel; on 1 April 1529 the Catholic Mass was banned there, after iconoclastic riots in the churches. Erasmus of Rotterdam left Basel on 13 April. He wrote to Thomas More that he would rather risk his life than appear to approve of their programme. He went to Catholic Freiburg, under the protection of Archduke Ferdinand, and first lived in the Haus zum Walfisch, the House of the Whale. Interestingly, he never taught at the university. He stayed until 1535. In the end he died in Basel after all, in 1536, and was buried in Basel Minster. If you walk on from the end of the Himmelreich route to Basel, you will stand in front of that minster.

Freiburg itself had decided in 1520 to remain Catholic, and it stayed that way. In 1620 the Jesuits took over two faculties of the university to counter the Reformation. From 1682 they built their college and the Jesuit church, today's University Church.

In the twentieth century the university became a centre of philosophy. Edmund Husserl taught here after the First World War, and Edith Stein, who was later murdered in Auschwitz as a Carmelite nun, also worked in Freiburg. In 1900 Freiburg became the first German university to admit women as students.

And then there is Martin Heidegger. He was elected rector on 21 April 1933 and ten days later, on 1 May, joined the Nazi Party. His rectoral address was titled „Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität“, the self-assertion of the German university. Under his rectorship Jewish teachers were forced out of the university under the new laws. In April 1934 he resigned as rector, but remained a party member until the end of the war. After the war he was dismissed, classified as a follower in 1949 and allowed to teach again in 1951. The Black Notebooks, published in 2014, contain antisemitic statements. So Freiburg has this too: one of the most influential thinkers of the century and one of its most shameful chapters, in the same person.

Plague, witches and the long war

The Habsburg centuries were not peaceful. In 1564 about 2,000 people died of the plague in Freiburg, roughly a quarter of the population. In 1536 the witch hunts began, reaching their peak in 1599. A plaque on the old town wall marks the place where people were burned.

Then came the Thirty Years' War. In 1618 between ten and fourteen thousand people lived in Freiburg; by 1648 there were only about two thousand left. In August 1644 the Battle of Freiburg was fought outside the town. The Gutleuthaus, where Albertus Magnus had once consecrated the altar of Saint James, was burned down by Swedish troops on 29 December 1632. The Münster came through this period as well.

From 1648 to 1805 Freiburg was the administrative seat of Further Austria, the Habsburg possessions in the south-west. In 1805 the town passed to Baden. And in 1827, as you already know, the Münster became a cathedral.

The night of 27 November 1944

Freiburg experienced the war from the air twice. On 10 May 1940 German aircraft mistakenly dropped bombs on their own city. About sixty bombs fell near the railway station; 57 people died, 22 of them children.

The great catastrophe came four years later. On the evening of 27 November 1944 the British Royal Air Force flew the operation it called Tigerfish. 59 Mosquito aircraft marked the target, and 292 Lancaster bombers dropped their loads. The attack began at 19:58 and ended at 20:18. In twenty minutes some 3,000 high-explosive bombs and more than 11,000 incendiaries fell on the city. 2,797 people died, and about 9,600 were injured.

The old town was almost completely destroyed, and whole suburbs with it. Around the Münsterplatz no houses were left standing on the west and north sides. Lost were the old town hall, the Gerichtslaube where the imperial diet had met, the Kornhaus, the Jesuits' University Church, the city theatre and the railway station. Of the Haus zum Walfisch, where Erasmus had lived, only the façade and the oriel window remained.

The Münster stayed standing. It was only lightly damaged. The tower was badly shaken. That it stayed upright is attributed to the lead anchors that connect the sections of the spire. Apart from the Münster, only a few buildings on the square survived, among them the Historisches Kaufhaus, the Wentzingerhaus and the Alte Wache.

And the Bächle helped. When the water mains were destroyed, the water of the Dreisam was still flowing in the little medieval channels, and it could be used to fight the fires.

Since 1994 a plaque on the west tower has commemorated that night. And every year on 27 November the Hosanna, the bell from 1258, rings at the hour of the raid. If you are in Freiburg in late autumn, you may hear it.

The question that remains

Was this raid necessary? People still argue about it today, and the question should be asked honestly, without making the answer too simple.

From the Allies' point of view there were military reasons for the raid. Freiburg was a railway junction on the Rhine Valley line and on the line to Colmar, important for troop movements into Alsace. The planners reckoned that through such junctions the Wehrmacht could move seven divisions from east to west within twelve to fourteen days. On 22 November 1944 General Eisenhower ordered attacks on rail and transport hubs.

What speaks against the raid is how it was carried out. Because the railway lines ran right through built-up areas, Freiburg was considered suitable for area bombing. According to the records, the mission order aimed to destroy the city and the adjacent rail system. There was hardly any arms industry in Freiburg. What was destroyed was above all homes, churches and the old town.

Both truths stand side by side. Germany had started this war, and Germany had bombed other countries' cities first. And yet in those twenty minutes almost 2,800 people died, most of them not soldiers. The writer Horst Krüger noted in 1945 that the city had burned completely, as it once had in the Thirty Years' War. Alfred Döblin, back from exile, described in 1946 a city in which churches, theatres and university were almost all lost, with graves among the ruins.

Freiburg has chosen to remember both. In the main cemetery 1,664 victims of that night lie in a common grave. On the keystone of the Münster there is a text by the writer Reinhold Schneider. And the bell rings every year, in remembrance.

Rebuilding on the old ground plan

On 21 April 1945 the French army occupied Freiburg. In April 1945 the city had just under 58,000 inhabitants. Only at the beginning of 1950 did it reach its pre-raid population again.

For the reconstruction, Freiburg made a clear decision. The city was rebuilt on its medieval ground plan, and almost all the historic buildings were rebuilt. If you walk through the old town today and think you are in a medieval city, you are both right and wrong: the lanes run as they did in the Middle Ages, but many of the walls beside them are younger than the war.

The Bertoldsbrunnen fountain in its 1806 version had also been destroyed that night. A new one was inaugurated on 27 November 1965, twenty-one years to the day after the raid.

In December 1945 Freiburg became the seat of government of the state of Baden. It remained so until 1952, when Baden merged into the new federal state of Baden-Württemberg. The French soldiers stayed until 1991. On the site of one of their barracks the Vauban district was later built, which we will come to shortly.

Water in the lanes

And now, as promised, the Bächle. You have long since seen them; perhaps you have already stepped into one. The narrow water channels run through almost all the streets and lanes of the old town. The name is Alemannic, a diminutive of Bach, brook.

They are first mentioned in writing in 1220. At that time Count Egino the First allowed the Tennenbacher Hof to use a field irrigated by a Bächle. They are fed from the Dreisam through a sluice near the Schwabentor that lets in between 200 and 500 litres per minute. About every eight minutes the whole network is completely refilled. According to the travel magazine Travelbook, around nine kilometres flow openly through the streets, and with the underground sections it is more than fifteen.

The Bächle were never meant as sewers but as service water. Drinking water came from springs in the hills; the Bächle water was for livestock, for fighting fires, for washing rain and dirt out of the town and for irrigating the fields outside the walls. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century they ran down the middle of the street.

In the nineteenth century they were seen as old-fashioned and as an obstacle to traffic. Between 1840 and 1851 they were moved to the edge of the street, and many were covered with wood, iron or stone. In the fifties a motoring club demanded that they be abolished altogether. The people of Freiburg resisted, and the Bächle stayed. In 1986 some sections that had been closed were even reopened.

The city has employed its own people to look after them since at least 1789, once called Bachräumer, today Bächleputzer, Bächle cleaners. They clean the channels, regulate the water with 142 brass valves and drain it completely in autumn and spring for the big clean. Since 1935 there has even been a carnival guild of Bächle cleaners that marches in the Fasnet parade.

And then there is the legend. Whoever steps into a Bächle by accident, so they say in Freiburg, will marry someone from Freiburg. Whoever steps in on purpose supposedly stays single. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder stepped into one in June 2001 and, as Wikipedia dryly notes, has not married anyone from Freiburg to this day. On hot days locals cool their feet in them, and children sail little boats. If you walk through the old town after a long day on tarmac: nobody will look at you askance if you do the same.

A city that builds forward

Today around 237,000 people live in Freiburg, more than 650,000 in the wider area. The city is considered one of the warmest in Germany. On 13 August 2003 a temperature of 40.2 degrees was measured here, the German record at the time.

Freiburg has earned a reputation as an ecological city. As early as June 1995 the city council decided that new buildings on municipal land had to be low-energy houses. At the end of the nineties the Vauban district was built on the site of the former French barracks, a neighbourhood for about 5,000 people, as a model for sustainable living, with many houses that get their electricity from the sun. In 2010 the British Academy of Urbanism named Freiburg European City of the Year.

And the Münster is still being built, in a sense. It is never really finished. The Münsterbauhütte, the cathedral workshop, works constantly on its upkeep, and the Münsterbauverein invests several million euros every year. The sandstone put in during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries weathers worse than some of the medieval stone. Since 2013 the workshop has therefore been preserving the old stones wherever possible and replacing many of the younger ones.

Around the Münster the market is held every weekday, with 80 to 180 stalls, on the square where trade was already done in the Middle Ages and on whose church wall the bread measures hang. Only on 15 August, the Assumption, the feast of the Münster's patron, does the square stay empty.

What Freiburg gives you

For pilgrims, Freiburg is a crossroads. Two Camino routes meet here, and the next morning you have to choose: west over the Rhine into Alsace, or south through the vineyards to Basel. Both routes lead to Santiago. There is no single right one.

But perhaps you take something else with you from this city. Freiburg is a place where people built, over generations, something they themselves never saw finished. The stonemasons on the tower, the builders of the choir who carried on after a pause of almost a hundred years, the Bächle cleaners who have been fishing leaves out of the channels for more than two hundred years. And it is a place that, after a night in which almost everything was lost, did not build something completely new but took up the old ground plan again, lane by lane.

That is not a bad attitude for a journey like yours. You will not understand everything you meet along the way. Some things you will not finish the way you imagined. And some things that break you will have to rebuild, on the ground plan you have.

When you set off tomorrow, turn around once more after a few kilometres. The tower is still there. It will stand at your back for a long time, as it stood at the backs of the pilgrims before you, and at some point it will disappear into the haze. Then it becomes one of the things you take with you.