Current Time in Würzburg, Germany

Würzburg is a historic city in northwestern Bavaria, Germany, situated on the Main River in the heart of the Franconian wine region. The city is dominated by the spectacular Marienberg Fortress rising on a hill above the right bank of the Main and by the magnificent Würzburg Residence, the baroque palace of the Prince-Bishops of Würzburg that was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Würzburg is also the start of the famous Romantic Road (Romantische Straße), Germany's most celebrated tourist route running south through Bavaria to the Alps.

With a population of approximately 130,000, Würzburg is an important regional center and university city, home to the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, one of Germany's oldest and most distinguished universities founded in 1402. The university contributes significantly to the city's intellectual and cultural life, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays here in 1895, one of the most consequential scientific discoveries in history, earning him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

The history of Würzburg is shaped by its role as a prince-bishopric, one of the most important ecclesiastical territories of the Holy Roman Empire. The bishops of Würzburg, who became princes of the empire with secular authority over their territory, accumulated enormous wealth from the Franconian wine trade and their political position, channeling this wealth into one of the most spectacular building programs of the European baroque. The Würzburg Residence, built between 1720 and 1744 under Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn and his successor, to designs by the Bavarian architect Balthasar Neumann, represents the supreme achievement of German baroque palace architecture.

The Würzburg Residence is considered by many historians and architectural critics to be the most beautiful baroque palace in Germany and indeed one of the finest baroque buildings in Europe. The Staircase Hall, the single most dramatic interior space in the palace, is covered by the largest ceiling fresco in the world, painted by the Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo between 1750 and 1753. The fresco, covering approximately 600 square meters of the ceiling vault, depicts the four continents known to 18th-century Europe as allegories around a central glorification of the Prince-Bishop. Remarkably, this fresco survived the devastating Allied bombing raid of March 16, 1945, which destroyed approximately 90% of Würzburg's historic center in under twenty minutes, killing nearly five thousand people.

The Marienberg Fortress, the ancient residence of the Würzburg bishops from the 13th to the 17th centuries, commands the hilltop above the Main with its massive round towers and fortifications. The fortress houses the Mainfränkisches Museum with important collections of sculptures by the Würzburg master Tilman Riemenschneider, one of the greatest German sculptors of the late Gothic period, whose extraordinary wooden and stone altar sculptures are found in churches throughout Franconia. The Old Main Bridge (Alte Mainbrücke), lined with twelve sandstone sculptures of saints and bishops, is a magnificent baroque monument and the social gathering place of the city.

The Franconian wine region around Würzburg produces distinctive wines in the unique bocksbeutel bottle, the flat-sided oval flask that is legally reserved for Franconian wines. The Würzburger Stein vineyard, the largest single vineyard in Germany producing wine on a slope above the Main directly adjacent to the city, produces some of the finest Silvaner and Riesling wines of the region. The wine taverns (Weinstuben) of Würzburg, including those operated by the city's historic charitable foundations in the Bürgerspital and Juliusspital buildings, provide the most authentic way to experience Franconian wine culture.

Würzburg is connected by ICE to Frankfurt in approximately one hour and to Munich in under two hours. The combination of the UNESCO Residence, Tiepolo ceiling frescoes, Marienberg Fortress, Riemenschneider sculptures, Franconian wine culture, and X-ray discovery heritage make Würzburg one of Bavaria's most historically rich and culturally rewarding cities.