You have never heard of Idar-Oberstein? Well, that is not too surprising as this 30.000 inhabitants town in Southwest Germany is probably not to be found in many tourist guides.
So how did we end up there and what’s to see around? The answer to the first question is: while Spreepferdchen was living in Berlin and Dönerbox was living in South Germany, the train to visit him would take Spreepferdchen straight through Idar-Oberstein. The greater area around takes you through a couple of cozy-looking towns in the valleys between green hills. So from that perspective, Idar-Oberstein is not too different from other towns along the ride, except for one thing: the Felsenkirche – a 15th-century church, carved into a rock face. Every time Spreepferdchen drove through the town, she thought: “This looks like a nice place for a long weekend hiking trip”. And after the Corona lockdown had kept us inside for too long, this is what we eventually did once Germany started opening up again.
The answer to the second question was more of a surprise to us. Not knowing much more about Idar-Oberstein that what the Felsenkirche looked like from the train, we did not prepare our spontaneous trip very much and mostly decided what to do on the spot. The first thing to know about Idar-Oberstein is that it used to be two places: Idar and Oberstein. As the former two towns are located mostly along one long road within a valley, the city centres of former Idar and Oberstein are a bit away from each other, with the train station and Felsenkirche closer to the Oberstein centre (which is important to know if you travel there by train). Having relied on having a rental car (which we didn’t have in the end but that’s another story), we stayed in Idar. Despite being so small, Idar-Oberstein has a fair amount of hotels in quite a range of prices. The first thing we found to do was visiting the gem mine Steinkaulenberg, which, according to Wikipedia, is the only gem mine in Europe that’s open to public visitors. During the one-hour guided tour through the mine (which we enjoyed a lot) we learned why Idar-Oberstein is the “gem capital of Germany” (a very interesting story which I do not want to spoil here). Indeed, all over the town you will find jewellery shops from “I bring one of these stones to all my family members and friends” to “I will gift this to my wife for our 50th anniversary” budgets. Both Idar and Oberstein each have a gem museum. We visited the one in Idar (Deutsches Edelsteinmuseum), which was very nice and we can only recommend to see it. The one in Oberstein also looked very nice from the outside, but we felt that one gem museum and a mine was enough precious stones for us to see within two days.
Lastly, we made it to Oberstein at the end of our short trip. In retrospective, booking our accommodation in Oberstein rather than in Idar would have been a better pick, not only because we travelled by train in the end. The centre of Oberstein was a bit more, let’s say lovely than that of Idar. From various spots within the town centre, you can see the Felsenkirche which is somewhat surreal to look at. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get very close to it as the path along the rock face was under construction. It was nice to see it from various angles anyway. Also, there is the ruin of the late 12th-century castle Burg Bosselstein and the reconstructed 14th-century castle Schloss Oberstein at the hilltop. The latter can be visited and also booked for weddings. Unfortunately, we arrived a bit late that day. The castle was closed already, but we were still able to enter the front court from where we had a great view over Oberstein. Also, the walking paths up to the church and the castles were marvellous. For a moment we thought we had entered Narnia. We really would have liked to spend more time on the hiking paths around but the time of our trip was running out…
