Bergstraße (route)
holiday road and region
The Bergstraße (German pronunciation: [ˈbɛʁkˌʃtʁaːsə] , lit. 'Mountain Road') is an 80-kilometre-long (50 mi) ancient trade route in the south-west of Germany, running north‒south from Darmstadt via Heidelberg to Wiesloch. The route and the area around it is a mountainous "theme route" running north–south along the western edge of the Odenwald forest in southern Hesse and northern Baden-Württemberg.
The route passes through the Bergstraße administrative district, and independent viticultural regions of Hessische Bergstraße and Badische Bergstraße. Between the cities of Heidelberg and Weinheim the Upper Rhine Railway Company (OEG) tram route runs alongside.
Route
The route goes almost straight from north to south at the spot where the Rhine lowlands meet the western edge of the Odenwald. The name comes from the road's route along the foot of the mountains, the Rhine lowlands once being too damp to build a road there.
The route mostly follows the modern B3 road. It begins in Darmstadt and, after passing through Eberstadt, splits into the "Old Bergstraße" and the "New Bergstraße", which goes somewhat further to the west. The two routes meet again at Zwingenberg.
In Weinheim-Lützelsachsen an old and a new Bergstraße once more form, the new one passing west of the old route as far as Heidelberg-Handschuhsheim, where the two meet once more.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bergstraße (route)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.