Ludwigshafen Travel Guide
A detailed destination guide for your next Germany vacation
Ludwigshafen Overview
Ludwigshafen am Rhein is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Ludwigshafen is located on the Rhine opposite Mannheim (Mannheim vacation rentals | Mannheim travel guide). Together with Mannheim, Heidelberg (Heidelberg vacation rentals | Heidelberg travel guide) and the surrounding region, it forms the Rhine Neckar Area. Ludwigshafen is known for its chemical industry (BASF). Among its cultural facilities rank the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz. Ludwigshafen is the birthplace of the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the philosopher Ernst Bloch.
In recent years, many efforts have been made to enhance Ludwigshafen's image in the media. The city administration has cut down its deficit by cutting down social payments and maintenance, pollution has been (not least by BASF) restricted, the formerly rotten Hemshof quarter has been restored.
The city center of Ludwigshafen is comparatively small and dominated by post-war buildings. Its northern and southern boundaries are the Hochstraßen (highways on stilts), the Rhine is in the East and the main station is located in the West of downtown Ludwigshafen, at a walking distance of about 15 minutes from the central pedestrian precinct Bismarckstraße that forms, together with the shopping mile Ludwigsstraße, the main North-South Axis, connecting the so-called “North Pole” with the Rathaus Center and the “South Pole” with Berliner Platz and Walzmühle. The main East-West connections are the Bahnhofsstraße and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße. The Pfalzbau, Staatsphilharmonie, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum and the half-destroyed monument Lutherkirche are main features of downtown Ludwigshafen.
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Things to See in Ludwigshafen
The Pfalzbau as a theater and concert hall has regional importance, the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz keeps its own symphonic orchestra. In the Hemshof district, there are smaller theatres playing regional dialect plays.
The Wilhelm-Hack-Museum is known for its Miró wall that is getting more and more filthy due to the city smog. Several small museums in Ludwigshafen concentrate on the very short city's history, first of all the Stadtmuseum in the Rathaus Center, but also the Schillerhaus Oggersheim, K.O. Braun-Museum in Oppau or the Frankenthaler Kanal Museum in the North. The Fachhochschule Ludwigshafen (technical college) is specialised on economics and has an affiliated Ostasieninstitut (East Asia Institute). There is also the Evangelische Fachhochschule Ludwigshafen, specialised on social sciences.
Parks
There are several municipal parks in Ludwigshafen: First of all the Ebertpark in the North quarter and Friesenheim. It was created for the South German Horticulture Exhibition in 1925 with the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, a multi-purpose hall. The official Stadtpark, or municipal park, is somewhat remote from the city centre (yet easy to reach by the #10 tram), because it is situated on the Parkinsel, or park island, on a bank of the Rhine. The Friedenspark is closer to the city centre, being located just north of the main station and west of the city hall. It is the youngest of Ludwigshafen's parks, having been created on a former industrial area with polluted grounds. Further, there are numerous smaller parks that are just a bit larger than a towel in the suburbs, for example the Stadtpark Oggersheim, Riedsaumpark, Alwin-Mittasch-Platz and Friesenpark in Friesenheim, Stadtpark Oppau, Bürgerpark Pfingstweide] or Zedtwitzpark Mundenheim.
The Maudacher Bruch in the West between Maudach, Gartenstadt and Oggersheim, is a very extensive, horse-shoe shaped area, including the Michaelsberg (126m), a mountain built of debris and wreckage after WW II. Due to excessive extraction of ground water from chemical companies the ground water level drops and the diversity of nature is no longer preserved. The Kief´scher Weiher in the South is connected with the River Rhine and serves as yacht harbour, being surrounded by weekend camping areas.
Public Transportation
Although Ludwigshafen itself has no airfield, it is well connected with several airports in the region. There are small airfields near Speyer (Speyer vacation rentals | Speyer travel guide), Bad Dürkheim (Bad Dürkheim vacation rentals | Bad Dürkheim travel guide) and Worms (Worms vacation rentals | Worms travel guide), a medium-sized regional airport in Mannheim (Mannheim vacation rentals | Mannheim travel guide) and the Frankfurt (Frankfurt vacation rentals | Frankfurt travel guide) International Airport in about an hour driving distance.
Ludwigshafen is the most important German harbour left of the Rhine. The local industry depends on shipping their raw materials and products on the river. The harbour of Ludwigshafen consists of several basins in the South of the city near Mundenheim (Luitpoldhafen, Kaiserwörthhafen, Mundenheimer Altrheinhafen), the wharfs along the river parallel to the city centre and the BASF, and, finally, of the Landeshafen basin in the North that connects the BASF.
Ludwigshafen has excellent Autobahn (motorway/highway) connections to all directions. Most important are the A 650 in West-East direction, the A 61 in North-South direction. But there are also A 6, A 65 and B 9 to be mentioned.
Ludwigshafen has a huge main station, its impressive pylon bridge pier serving as the city's landmark, it is rarely used. The extraordinary architecture of the station complex is caused by the need to connect three joining tracks (to Frankenthal/Worms/Mainz, to Neustadt/Speyer and to Mannheim) and to work in the underground Straßenbahn station and the massive road bridge above the concourse. Other railway stations are at Oggersheim, Mundenheim, Rheingönheim, and, of late, near Berliner Platz. Since 2003, the S-Bahn Rhein-Neckar suburban train system runs successfully in the region.
[ source: wikipedia ]
Maps and Driving Directions to Ludwigshafen
The train station bridge in Ludwigshafen
[ source: Flickr]
Related Sites
We collected some useful links related to Ludwigshafen. If you know a few more sites not listed here, or also know some insider tips or point of interests for this destination? Please share and submit your Germany travel tip. If approved it will be shown on this page!
- Homepage of Ludwigshafen: Ludwigshafen (official home page)
- Wikipedia: Ludwigshafen
More about the History of Ludwigshafen
In antiquity, Celtic and Germanic tribes settled here and during the 1st century B.C., the Romans conquered the region and a Roman auxiliary fort was constructed near the present suburb of Rheingönheim.
In the Middle Ages, some of the later suburbs of Ludwigshafen were founded, for example Oggersheim, Maudach, Oppau and Mundenheim, but most of the area was still swampland.
Already in 1808, during the French occupation, Carl Hornig from Mannheim (Mannheim vacation rentals | Mannheim travel guide) had purchased the fortress from the French authorities and turned it into a resting place for French sailors that needed to pass from that area of the Rhine River. Later, the Rheinschanze with its winter-proof harbour basin (created by a flood in 1824) was used as trading post. Hornig died in 1819, but Johann Heinrich Scharpff, the businessman from Speyer (Speyer vacation rentals | Speyer travel guide), continued Hornig's plans, which were then turned over to his son-in-law, Philipp Markus Lichtenberger, in 1830. Their activities marked the beginning of the civilian use of the Rheinschanze.
The year 1843 was the official birth of Ludwigshafen, when Lichtenberger sold this property to the state of Bavaria (Bayern), and the military title of the fortress was finally removed. The Bavarian king, Ludwig I, set forth plans to rename the settlement after himself and to start construction of an urban area as a Bavarian rival to Mannheim on the opposite bank.
During the failed German revolution of 1848, rebels took young Ludwigshafen, but they were bombarded from Mannheim (rumours said the Mannheimers didn't aim at the revolutionaries, but on the rival harbour's infrastructure) and Prussian troops quickly expelled the revolutionaries. On December 27, 1852, King Maximilian II granted Ludwigshafen am Rhein political freedom and as soon as November 8, 1859, the settlement gained town status.
But this “town” was still a very modest settlement with just 1.500 inhabitants. The real growth began with industrialization, which gained enormous momentum in Ludwigshafen because of its ideal transport facilities: The perfect Rhine harbour has already been mentioned and in 1849 the railway connecting Ludwigshafen with the Saar coalfields was finished.
The year 1865 was an important date in the history of independent Ludwigshafen. After several discussions, BASF decided to move its factories from Mannheim to the Hemshof district, which belonged to Ludwigshafen. From now on, the city's rapid growth and wealth was linked to the BASF's success and the company's expansion to one of the world's most important chemical companies. And the BASF was not the only chemical plant in Ludwigshafen. There were a lot of other rapidly growing chemical companies, which were not as big as the BASF, but big enough to gain a national and international reputation, for example the Friedrich Raschig GmbH, the Benckiser company (founded by Johann Benckiser), the Giulini brothers, the Grünzweig&Hartmann AG and the Knoll AG.
With more jobs available, the population of Ludwigshafen started to increase very rapidly, so that in 1899 the city was governing more than 62,000 residents (Compared to 1,500 in 1852).
This rapid population explosion looked quite “American” to contemporaries, it determined Ludwigshafen's character as a “worker's town” and created problematic shortages of housing and real estates. The solution was the expansion of the municipal area and the incorporation of the two nearest villages, Friesenheim and Mundenheim, in the years 1892 and 1899. In the area between the town centre and those two suburbs new quarters (“North” and “South”) were built after (then) modern urban development plans. Because the ground was marshy and too low to be protected from Rhine floods, all the new houses were built on raised ground, sometimes as high as 5 meters above the original ground. You can see the original ground level in many backyards of Ludwigshafen, which are sometimes two floors below street level.
[ source: wikipedia ]
What makes this Live Like a German Ludwigshafen Travel Guide special...
This Ludwigshafen travel guide provides you with an overview of Ludwigshafen, Ludwigshafen pictures, and a local travel guide that suggests many special trips, unique activities, and vacation ideas, that you can't find in a typical Germany travel guide.
Some of this information is compiled from popular and well-known sources (e.g., such as Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and great pictures from Flickr). However, what makes this Germany travel guide special is that most of the travel suggestions and insider tips are provided by local residents, property owners, and our readers, who share and submit their travel tips with us. All submissions are then editorially reviewed to ensure high quality. All this information is logically organized within this destination guide to make it easy for you to find things quickly.
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