Where to Stay in Kassel, Hessen

What is Kassel known for?

Kassel is known around the world for documenta, the exhibition of contemporary art that fills the city every five years and centres on the Fridericianum. Its other great draw stands on the hills. Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sends water tumbling down monumental terraces below a colossal statue of Hercules.

Kassel is also Grimm country, the city where the brothers gathered their fairy tales, now retold at the Grimmwelt Kassel above the Fulda in northern Hessen.

What are the main landmarks in Kassel?

The main landmarks in Kassel range from the hillside park to the museums of the centre. Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, crowns the city with its Hercules statue and cascading water. Down in the centre the art gathers.

The Fridericianum stands at the heart of documenta, the Ottoneum holds the natural-history collection, the Neue Galerie and the Hessian State Museum show fine art and antiquities, and the Grimmwelt Kassel tells the story of the fairy-tale brothers above the Fulda.

What is the history of Kassel?

Kassel grew from a medieval settlement on the Fulda that received its town charter in 1330, and for centuries it was a seat of power. It became the residence of the landgraves and later electors of Hesse-Kassel, who ruled a state from the city and built the palaces and gardens that still define it. Their grandest project climbed the western hills.

Over generations the landgraves laid out Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, crowning it with the Hercules statue and the great cascade of water that now carries UNESCO World Heritage status. The Enlightenment left its own mark when the Fridericianum opened as one of the first public museums on the European continent. The modern centuries were harder on the old city.

Kassel lost its independent statehood, and in the twentieth century wartime bombing destroyed much of the medieval core, so the modern centre is largely a postwar rebuilding. Out of that ruin came reinvention. The documenta exhibition of contemporary art was founded here in the postwar years and returns every five years to make Kassel a fixture of the art world.

The Brothers Grimm, who worked in the city and gathered their tales here, gave it a second identity now kept alive at the Grimmwelt Kassel above the Fulda in northern Hessen.

Where is Kassel?

Kassel sits on the Fulda River in northern Hessen, in the hilly heart of central Germany. The city fills a river basin ringed by wooded uplands, and to the west the ground climbs steeply to the ridge of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. The setting is green and hilly.

Forested slopes and the surrounding heights of northern Hessen frame the town, while the Fulda threads through the centre and carries the valley northward out of the city.

What is the climate of Kassel?

Kassel has a temperate upland climate shaped by its basin among the hills of northern Hessen. Winters are cool to cold, with more frost and snow than the milder Rhine cities to the west, held in by the surrounding heights. Kassel's summers run warm and leafy in the basin.

The wooded slopes above the Fulda and the elevation of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe keep the air fresher than the lowlands, and rain falls readily across the seasons in this central German upland.

How do you get to Kassel?

Getting to Kassel is straightforward by rail from central Germany. The Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station sits on the north-south high-speed line, putting the city within easy reach of Frankfurt am Main to the south and the wider German network. The autobahn crosses here too.

Fast trains and motorways meet at Kassel in the middle of the country, and local trams and buses connect the centre with the Wilhelmshöhe park and the surrounding towns of northern Hessen along the Fulda.