Lüneburg

This Northern German city is located 40 km southeast of Hamburg, at the edge of what was historically a frontier region where Lower Saxony borders Mecklenburg. The city is mostly known for its historical center, showcasing numerous Brick Gothic buildings, either incredibly well preserved, or carefully restored.

Lüneburg owes its wealth to the vast salt deposits found in the area. It started with a salt water spring, discovered in the Early Middle Ages at the bottom of a hill where the Old Town now stands. Salt was essential for preserving meat and fish, so it was considerably valuable at the time, but the fact there is very little of it in the Baltic region made that discovery even more significant.

By the 1300's production had ramped-up to a point where Lüneburg's saltworks were shipping raw salt and brined fish throughout Scandinavia. The town had then joined the Hanseatic League, a Northern European network of semi-autonomous trading cities, and much of the Lüneburg we know today was built during that era. A canal was dug in the late 1300's to connect Lüneburg with the port of Lübeck, 70km north, in order to replace the dangerous country road along which convoys used to travel to ship their white gold to the Baltics. Both the canal and the old road still exist today, and have become popular cycle-touring destinations.

Things were brought to a halt by the mid-1500’s, when political conflict and increased competition from southern cities severely weakened the Hansa. With its boomtown years behind, hardly any new houses were built in central Lüneburg, therefore the historical appearance of the Old Town has remained virtually unchanged until today.

Remarkably, Lüneburg’s salt industry subsisted until 1980. A thousand years of salt production left a permanent mark in the city, not only culturally but also geologically: due to centuries of mining the soil has shifted in several places across the city, and buildings had to be stabilized as the ground they were built on gradually sunk. Today the city is experiencing a new period of growth, driven partly by a wave of start-ups fostered by its university, and also because the rising costs of living in the Hamburg metropolitan area are turning Lüneburg into a great alternative for families.