Rothenburg ob der Tauber has not expanded beyond its medieval walls since the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years' War and a plague outbreak in 1634 emptied the town's coffers and its houses, and the impoverished survivors simply stopped building. Poverty preserved what prosperity would have replaced. The result is a walled Franconian town of roughly 11,000 residents whose street plan, gate towers and gabled merchant houses remain substantially as they stood in 1600. The town sits above a bend in the Tauber, on a plateau that made it defensible and made its market lucrative. Granted Free Imperial City status in 1274, Rothenburg answered to the Emperor alone and grew rich on trade routes running north to south. Its walls run roughly 3.4 kilometres, punctuated by more than forty towers and gates. A covered sentry walk crowns most of that circuit, and the town charges nothing to climb it — a rarity among heritage sites of comparable stature. Any romantic road rothenburg and harburg tour from munich reaches this stretch of Franconia by following the Romantische Straße, the post-war touring route devised in the 1950s to steer travellers between Würzburg and Füssen. Harburg, ninety kilometres south, offers the counterweight. Harburg Castle is one of the best-preserved fortresses in southern Germany, held by the Counts of Oettingen since 1150, its towers and chapel still ringed by an unbroken curtain wall above the Wörnitz valley. Rothenburg is a town that fortified itself; Harburg is a fortress that acquired a village. Together they compress five centuries of Bavarian defensive architecture into a single southbound drive. Within the walls, the architecture rewards close reading. St. Jakob's Church holds Tilman Riemenschneider's Holy Blood Altar, carved in limewood between 1501 and 1505, its figures lit by a sapphire-blue window set behind them. The Rathaus pairs a Gothic tower of 1250 with a Renaissance facade of 1572 — two architectural centuries wedged against each other on the Marktplatz. The Plönlein, where two lanes fork beneath a leaning yellow house, has become the most reproduced streetscape in Germany. Much of what visitors see is careful repair. Roughly forty percent of the old town burned in an Allied air raid on 31 March 1945; the reconstruction, funded partly by international donors who sponsored individual metres of wall, was completed with matching materials. Rothenburg ob der Tauber day trips and Romantische Straße coach tours now bring visitors along the same corridor the route's designers imagined, and demand for romantic road rothenburg and harburg tour from munich tickets remains steady through the summer season.