Welcome to the Castle of Heidelberg

We can offer you an interesting and educational day‘s tour in Heidelberg at an advantageous price – a full program, from arrival to departure.

The class excursion consists of three modules:

I. The Heidelberg castle and a history quiz

II. The Old Town

III. A riverboat trip on the Neckar

Of course, your school class can also visit the world-famous Heidelberg castle only, without visiting the Old Town or taking the boat trip.

 

I. The Heidelberg castle

Make history appealing to your pupils – with an audio tour! Our modern guided tour presents 20 of the most interesting sights of the Heidelberg castle ruins to your pupils by means of an audio guide and a plan in roughly ninety minutes. The audiotapes are easy to operate – rewinding and repeating parts of the text are possible whenever you please.

Sound effects, poems by Goethe, Scheffel, Hoelderlin, and numerous sagas make the tour come alive, and give the listener the impression of being in the midst of the castle’s exciting history.

Experience shows that school children like to operate modern technology, to use the audio guides to look for certain objects with the help of the plan, and to explore the castle with them independently, whether in groups or accompanied by their teacher.

Service for Foreign Exchange Classes
The spectrum of languages available in our audio guides makes smultaneous participation for German and foreign-language exchange pupils possible, because each pupil can hear the guided tour in his or her own language.

History Quiz
Together with our audio tour, we also offer you a history quiz in German, English, or French, the answers to which can be heard in the course of the tour. With a sufficiently large number of participants, you can set up competing teams and, if you like, award prizes – an interesting and instructive game, which is also a lot of fun.

(Please don’t forget to bring writing material!)

(print game)

(print solution)

 
Special Prices for Pupils and Teachers, Reservations

Special price (audio tour):
EUR 3,00 per audio guide for groups of 20 or more (for teachers, free of charge)

Admission to the castle:
EUR 4,50 per pupil (teachers free of charge)


 

II. The Old Town

After the audio tour of the Heidelberg castle, we wander into the Old Town. In about ten minutes on foot, your class arrives at the Market Square (Marktplatz), with the Church of the Holy Ghost (Heiliggeistkirche) and the nearby Old Bridge.
 

Some Information about the Sights:

1. The Church of the Holy Ghost

• Built on the site of two churches dating to the 13th and 14th centuries
• Served religious, but also secular functions
• Here were the crypts of the Electors Palatinate: for example, the Elector Ruprecht IIIrd, whom we have already met in the Heidelberg castle, was buried here
• In the year 1441, the invaluable library, the Bibliotheca Palatina, was brought from the church into the castle
• For 230 years, the church had been divided by a wall into a Catholic and a Protestant half

2. The Old Bridge

• Also known as the “Carl-Theodor Bridge“
• One of the finest bridges in the world
• Built 1786-1788, after eight wooden predecessors had been destroyed by natural catastrophes and wars
• The Bridge Ape: a symbol of human shortcomings
• The Carl-Theodor monument: demonstrates the Elector’s power
• The River Gods: symbolize the four most important rivers in Germany – the Danube, the Rhine, the Neckar, and the Mosel

III. Riverboat Trip on the Neckar

After the visit to the Old Town, it is a five minutes’ walk to the landing-stage “Stadthalle“ (Town Hall), where your school class can take a riverboat trip on the Neckar. In an excursion on the Neckar upriver, in the direction of Eberbach, you travel through the most scenic part of the lower Neckar. After passing under the Old Bridge, you can see the Heidelberg castle on the right; the passage through the lock, in which the ship is raised by a height of three meters, is also fascinating. Then you see the Benedictine monastery, the Neuburg Seminary, built in the 12th century. Goethe, Brahms, and Weber found time for work and leisure here.

Reservations: Tel. 06221-20181; Fax: 06221-20211