The Best Of South West: Culture, Spa And More – 7 days / 6 nights

Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, the Black Forest and Lindau on Lake Constance, in seven days and six nights with a private driver-guide. The line runs south-west from the Neckar to the Alps, and the pace is deliberately gentle: a guided morning, an afternoon that is either a thermal bath or a lake, and no day that starts before your clients want it to. This is the indoor and restorative half of our south-west programme.

Heidelberg and Baden-Baden

The week opens in Heidelberg, where the red sandstone castle ruin stands above a baroque old town and the oldest university in Germany, founded in 1386. Your clients walk the Hauptstrasse, the Marktplatz and the Old Bridge, and cross to the Philosophers’ Walk for the view back. Baden-Baden follows: a spa town that Europe’s nineteenth century treated as its summer capital, with thermal water rising from beneath the Roman bath ruins, a colonnaded promenade along the Oos, a casino in the Kurhaus and an opera house in the old railway station. Two contrasting nights, both of them about being somewhere rather than seeing everything.

The Black Forest and Lake Constance

From Baden-Baden the route takes the high road south through the forest, stopping in the timber-framed valley towns, at the clock and craft workshops and at whichever viewpoints the weather is giving that day. The week ends on Lake Constance at Lindau, a small island town connected to the shore by a causeway, with a harbour entrance framed by a lighthouse and a Bavarian lion and the Austrian and Swiss Alps standing across the water. It is the softest possible finish and the easiest place on the route to do nothing at all.

Who it is for and when to run it

This suits clients who travel to recover rather than to accumulate, couples, and guests who want culture at a walking pace with a bath at the end of it. It also works well as a second Germany trip for people who have already done Berlin and Munich. Unlike most itineraries in the region it holds up in winter, when the baths are at their best and the towns are quiet – the nature and myths version of the south-west week is the summer alternative. Heidelberg alone is covered by the castle and old town walking tour. Cruise guests joining or leaving nearby should look at our Black Forest pre and post cruise programme, and the full regional range sits in our South West Germany portfolio.