Today the weather is nice - finally. So we had a chance to go out and take a look at the sightseeing places of Bruchsal. Bruchsal was first named in 976, but there are places even older than that. Bruchsal is famous for its beautiful baroque palace, for asparagus and for traffic jams on the autobahn.
Here you see the Damian Gate, which is the entrance to the palace area. You can see art exhibitions there every now and then. It's my friend Henry, who you can see on this photo, because somehow I missed it.
We crossed the street and walked to the fountain in front of the county court. Such a pity, that my host forgot to take a photo of the county court, but you can see it on another photo.
Here you can read a about the fountain:
We crossed the street again and walked into the palace front garden. At first we took a photo of a sign:
The big part of the building is the main building of the palace. On the left side you see the catholic church St. Damian and Hugo, where my hosts go to Sunday service.
Here you can see from left to right: the building with the chamber music hall, the tower of Damian Gate, the little piece of the tower of the jailhouse, then the tree. At next there are two more buildings, which belong to the palace area, between both is the street, which we crossed before. Then the higher building on the right side is the county court. And you can see the little gate, through which we walked into the front garden.
We walked into the church to take a look at old photos. You can see, that the palace was destroyed during World War II. They rebuilt the area, but the church inside is modern nowadays.
In the second last photo you can see a little gate, which leads from the front part to the back part of the palace. We walked through it and took a photo of the backside of the church and the church tower.
There are some fountains on the backside of the palace. Each year there are open air concerts and it's a place for nice wedding photos. Around Christmas there is a second Christmas market at that place, too.
Four guards with halberts are at the line between the fountain part and the palace garden.
We walked to the little pond, where usually you can find many ducks.
At two crossings of the main way you can find a statue at each corner. This crossing shows the four elements water, fire, earth, air. Here you see the fire statue.
This crossing shows the four seasons winter, spring, summer, autumn. This statue is summer.
There are several ways lined with chestnut trees.
We left the palace area and drove to the backside of the hospital. There is a parking place and we stopped to take two photos: one shows the old hospital building with its nice little tower and the other shows the jailhouse.
Then we drove to the Belvedere, which was built as a hunting lodge for Prince Bishop Franz Christoph von Hutten.
Next to the Belvedere and Stadtgarten there is a place, where you have a great view over Bruchsal.
You can see the two towers of the baroque church St. Peter, which is close to my host's house. In the street right in front of me you can see some of the oldest houses of Bruchsal. 80 % of Bruchsal was destroyed during the war, so mostly you only see houses built from 1945 to today.
The buildings in front of me and the white one on the left side belong to the older people's house. Then there is the private catholic grammer school called St. Paulusheim - the big grey building in the far left side.
This nice house also is next to the Belvedere. Nowadays it belongs to a hotel.