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2026-05-18Walking the Oberwesel wall
Sixteen towers, an afternoon, and a note on where the circuit is actually legible.
The wall walk at Oberwesel is the best two hours on this stretch of river and almost nobody does it. Start at the Ochsenturm at the north end, which is the one everybody photographs from the train, and work south along the river side first.
The instructive stretch is between the Steingassenturm and the Katzenturm, where the fourteenth-century strengthening is visible as a straight vertical joint against the thirteenth-century work. On the landward side the circuit is broken by later building and you spend more time in car parks than on the wall.
Practical: the towers are not individually open, the walk is unfenced in places, and the section south of the Kuhhirtenturm is genuinely narrow. Good shoes, no hurry.