At the Saale river’s light beach…
Cycling trips along the saale river
Not only poets dream about the old city of Jena with its university picturesquely surrounded by rocks of chalk in the beautiful Saale valley. Goethe never gave up his beloved Dornburg castles on the high river banks. The most beautiful about the river are the magnificent castles situated along its course. From Saalfeld to Naumburg they seam both sides of the river as closely as seen nowhere else in Germany. Cities like Jena, Naumburg and Halle reflect their glorious history highlights as the northernmost vineyards or the longest salina in Europe long to be discovered.
Our cycling trips along the saale
this is how beautiful the saale river is
Comfortable cycling
On the cool beach of the Saale you roll through Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt to the mouth of the Saale into the Elbe in Barby near Magdeburg. The Saaleradweg is also the D-Route 11, excellently developed and well signposted. From Jena they cycle quite comfortably and without gradients.
Castles, ruins and fortresses without end
Romantic castles, magnificent palaces and ruins sit enthroned on the hills that line the Saale. They are the attractions along the Saale Cycle Route and strung like pearls on a string. In the order of their appearance along the cycle path, they are: in Rudolstadt, the Heidecksburg residential castle, followed by the Weissenburg, the Leuchtenburg, also called the Queen of the Saale Valley, the Kunitzburg, the Dornburg castles, the Camburg and the Cyriaksruine. The famous Saale castles Saaleck and Rudelsburg near Naumburg, Weißenfels with the baroque castle Neu-Augustusburg, castle Merseburg, in Halle castle Giebichenstein and the Moritzburg, the ancestral castle of the Wettins, the residential castle Plötzkau and castle Bernburg. Finally, the castle ruins in Klein Rosenburg are the last in the line of the many Saale castles. "On the bright beach of the Saale, castles stand proud and bold, ..." already wrote the poet Franz Kugler. Such a density of cultural monuments is certainly unique and will inspire you. Which one do you like the most? But the cities along the way are no less interesting: Whether the university and light city of Jena with the oldest projection planetarium in the world, which is still in operation, or Naumburg with its historic old town and the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul. Halle has a cathedral that stands out with its round-arched gable, and the Nebra Sky Disk is on display in the State Museum of Prehistory. The Ottostadt Magdeburg inspires with the cathedral and the green citadel, a work of the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
Poet and Culture Trail
There is no shortage of culture, poets and thinkers along the Saale: visit the Schiller House in Rudolstadt - the site where the poet princes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller first met. You can also learn more about Schiller in Jena, which is home
to Schiller's garden house, where he lived and wrote poetry for ten years. In the Jena Botanical Garden there is a Goethe memorial in the Inspector's House of the Botanical Garden, where he lived from 1817 - 1822. There is even a Goethe Society in Naumburg. Stages performing the plays of the two gentlemen and more can be found, for example, in the "neues theater Halle", in the Kulturhaus Weißenfels, in the Goethe Theater Bad Lauchstädt, in the Theater Naumburg, Germany's smallest municipal theater, in the Theater Schloss Kochberg and in the Theaterhaus Jena. There are also theater festivals, namely the Naumburg Street Theater Days and in Jena the TheaterArena to the KulturArena. Here you are clearly spoiled for choice.
Dumplings and cherry pans
Since the Saale flows through Thuringia, among other places, Thuringian grilled sausages, also known as Roster, and the famous Thuringian dumplings, two-thirds of which are made from raw, grated potatoes and one-third from boiled potatoes, are naturally delicious on its banks. In Naumburg, try the Naumburger Kirschpfanne, where layers of dough and cherries are baked in a pan in the oven, or the juicy, Saxon Quark-Keulchen. As a cyclist's snack for in between meals, the so-called Fett-Bemme is good - called Schmalzbrot in high German. It goes well with a glass of beer or simply a draught soda. Last but not least, Saale-Unstrut wines are drunk here, whose vines have ripened on the sunlit slopes: Müller-Thurgau, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, Bacchus, Riesling and Silvaner are the best known.
Saale Cascades and Saale Nature Parks
The second longest tributary of the Elbe flows through varied landscapes such as at the beginning through the Fichtelgebirge, then through Europe's largest interconnected reservoir area in Thuringia, the five-tiered Saale Cascades. Species-rich riparian forests lie along its banks and nature parks such as the Saale-Unstrut-Trialsand Geo-Nature Park with near-natural forests and countless bird species such as long-eared owls or red kites and the Lower Saale Valley Nature Park with many side valleys and rocky slopes, floodplains and orchard meadows.
