Loreley

Interesting facts

Before the dangerous reefs were blasted, skippers rang a bell three times as they approached the rock to call their crews to prayer.

The perils of this stretch are said to be why Saint Goar settled here, devoting himself to rescuing and nursing shipwrecked boatmen.

Only one spot on the navigable Rhine is deeper than the old Lorelei channel: the St. Anna-Loch near Rheinfelden on the Swiss border, about 32 metres deep.

Vineyards belonging to the Counts of Katzenelnbogen are recorded on the rock as early as 1395.

The rock was once credited with a sevenfold echo, which old tales blamed on dwarfs living inside it.

Before the 19th century the rock was masculine in German, appearing in records under names such as der Lurlei and der Lurleberch.

Brentano based his ballad partly on a 1631 verse paraphrase of Ovid's Metamorphoses that he owned, linking the rock to the myth of the nymph Echo.

Heine's poem was too popular for the Nazis to ban, so they credited it to an unknown poet to hide its Jewish author.

Besides Silcher's famous tune, more than forty other 19th-century settings of Heine's poem exist, including one by Clara Schumann from 1843.

A fountain memorial to Heine crowned by the Lorelei, made by the sculptor Ernst Herter, stands in the Bronx in New York City.

Why it is worth it

Above a tight bend of the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, a slate cliff rises 132 metres almost straight out of the water. The Lorelei marks the narrowest and deepest point of the river's navigable course between Basel and Rotterdam: here the Rhine squeezes to about 160 metres across and was once up to 25 metres deep, winding between reefs and shallows. For centuries this was among the most dangerous passages on the river, recorded as a place of wrecks from the tenth century on; some of the rocks were blasted away in the 1930s, and traffic through the gorge is still regulated by signal stations. The rock stands in the heart of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, a cultural landscape of castles, vineyards and river towns inscribed by UNESCO in 2002, and the view from its summit takes in the river loop and Katz Castle on the slope above Sankt Goarshausen.

The name is usually traced to an old dialect word for murmuring combined with "ley", rock: the strong current, a small waterfall and a remarkable echo once made the cliff seem to hum. An older tale placed dwarfs in caves inside the rock. The figure everyone now associates with it, however, is a literary invention. In 1801 the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano wrote a ballad about Lore Lay, a woman whose beauty brought men to ruin and who fell to her death from the rock. In 1824 Heinrich Heine reworked the theme into his poem "Die Lorelei", in which a golden-haired maiden sits combing her hair high above the river and her song lures boatmen onto the rocks.

Set to music by Friedrich Silcher in 1837, Heine's poem became one of the best-known songs in German, and the story spread so widely that it came to be taken for an ancient folk legend. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the many who returned to the theme. On the plateau above the cliff stands an open-air amphitheatre built in 1939 that still hosts large concerts, and since 2019 a landscape park leads from it to the viewpoints at the rock's edge; the right-bank railway runs through a tunnel in the rock itself.

Getting there

The Lorelei rises beside Sankt Goarshausen, whose railway station on the right bank of the Rhine connects with Koblenz, Wiesbaden and Frankfurt; a ferry crosses to Sankt Goar on the left bank. Boppard lies about 14 km away. The nearest airport is Frankfurt-Hahn (HHN), about 40 km away.

Loreley

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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