Where to Stay in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein

What is Kiel known for?

Kiel is the capital of Schleswig-Holstein and the largest German city on the Baltic, laid along the Kieler Förde where the boats for Scandinavia load at the head of the water. Sailing runs the summer. Kiel Week fills the inlet with rigs from everywhere, the Kiel Canal starts at the Holtenau locks and carries shipping through to the North Sea, and the Kunsthalle and the Kiel Maritime Museum keep the collections down beside the quays.

What are the main landmarks in Kiel?

Kiel's landmarks all stand within sight of the Förde. St. Nikolai stands on the Alter Markt as the one medieval church left standing after the bombing, and the Kieler Kloster and the Warleberger Hof survive near it as the oldest secular buildings in the town. Art faces the Förde.

Kunsthalle Kiel and the Zoological Museum of Kiel University line the shore road, the Kiel Maritime Museum works out of the old Fischhalle on the quay, and the Ravensberg Watertower and the Kiel Transmission Tower mark the high ground behind the centre.

What is the history of Kiel?

Kiel took its town rights in 1242. A Holstein count laid the streets on a spit between the Förde and an inland water, and the Kieler Kloster went up soon after for the Franciscans. The town joined the Hanseatic League and was later thrown out of it.

Fortune arrived much later: a university was founded in 1665, the dukes held a residence in Kiel Castle, and in the nineteenth century the Prussian navy chose this inlet for its Baltic base, which turned a small market town into a yard town of slipways, barracks and workers' terraces. The canal came in 1895, cut clean across the neck of the Jutland Peninsula to Brunsbüttel so that warships could reach the North Sea without rounding Denmark. Then the fleet refused.

The sailors who mutinied in Kiel in 1918 set off the revolution that ended the German Empire, and the memory of it sits under the city's politics still. The next war flattened almost everything the yards had built. Rebuilding was quick and deliberately plain, so St. Nikolai now stands among post-war blocks and the Förde does the work the old streets once did.

Where is Kiel?

Kiel stands at the head of the Kieler Förde, a long inlet of the Bay of Kiel on the Baltic. The built-up area wraps both shores of that water, with the Schwentine coming in from the east and the Kiel Canal cutting away west across the neck of the Jutland Peninsula at Holtenau. The ground is glacial.

Low moraine ridges, beech woods and small lakes run inland through Holstein, while the shoreline alternates between slipways, beaches and reed.

What is the climate of Kiel?

The Baltic keeps Kiel's weather even and grey. Water on both sides of the Förde holds the frost off in winter and the heat down in summer, so hard cold is short-lived, snow is unreliable and the wind counts for far more here than the thermometer. Autumn gales push water up the inlet.

Summer pays it all back with the long northern evenings that make the sailing season worth the rest of the year.

How do you get to Kiel?

Kiel Hauptbahnhof and the ferry terminals stand a few hundred metres apart at the head of the Förde. Trains reach Hamburg in about an hour, and the overnight boats leave the same quays for Oslo and Gothenburg. Ships dominate.

The Kiel Canal brings coasters and cruise ships in through the Holtenau locks from the North Sea, the motorway from Hamburg ends inside the city, and the small Förde ferries work as buses between the two shores.