Hamburg travel guide — Hamburg tourism and travel information

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Hamburg travel guide

about Hamburg

Hamburg is Germany's second largest city (after Berlin) and its principal port. The official name Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg recalls its membership in the mediæval Hanseatic League and the fact that Hamburg is a city state and one of Germany's sixteen Bundesländer.

The state and administrative city cover 750 km; with 1.8 million inhabitants, while another 750,000 live in neighbouring urban areas. The Greater Hamburg Metropolitan Region (Metropolregion Hamburg) including nearby districts of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony covers 18,100 km; with a population of 4 million.

Hamburg history

Founded in the first decade of the 9th century as Hamma Burg ("fortified town"), it was designated the seat of a bishopric (834) whose first bishop Ansgar became known as the Apostle of the North. In 845 a fleet said to number 600 Viking ships came up the River Elbe and destroyed Hamburg, at that time a place of around 500 inhabitants. Two years after that Hamburg was united with Bremen as the bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. In 1030 the city was burned down by King Mieszko II of Poland. The

Frederick I "Barbarossa" is said to have granted free access up the Lower Elbe to Hamburg in a charta of 1189. Hamburg's proximity to the main trade routes of the North and Baltic Seas quickly made it a major port of Northern Europe, and its alliance (1241) with Lübeck on the Baltic is considered the origin of the powerful Hanseatic League of trading cities. However, Frederick's document, still at display at the town museum, is known to be a fake from around 1265. Therefore Hamburg does not hold city rights.

In the 1520s the city authorities embraced Lutheranism, and Hamburg subsequently received Protestant refugees from the Netherlands and France. At times under Danish sovereignty while a part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1768 it gained full Danish recognition as an Imperial Free City.

Annexed briefly by France (1810 -14), Hamburg suffered severely during Napoleon I's last campaign in Germany, but experienced its fastest growth during the second half of the 19th century, when its population more than quadrupled to 800,000 as the growth of the city's Atlantic trade helped make it Europe's third-largest port.

Hamburg was destroyed by fire several times, notably in 1284 and 1842. The last and worst destruction took place in World War II, when the city suffered a series of devastating air raids (24 July-2 August 1943). Today's inner city therefore hosts almost no buildings from before 1842 and even few from before 1945. In February 1962 the city's low-lying areas were affected by severe flooding.

The city boundaries were extended in 1937 with the Groß-Hamburg-Gesetz (Greater Hamburg Act) to incorporate neighbouring Wandsbek, Harburg-Wilhelmsburg and Altona.

During World War II and in response to Germany levelling Coventry two days before, the Royal Air Force began to bomb Hamburg on November 16, 1940. Later, in Operation Gomorrah the British bombed Hamburg on July 28, 1943 which caused a firestorm that killed 42,000 German civilians. By the end of the war at least 50,000 Hamburg residents died from Allied attacks.

The population of the city proper peaked in the mid-1960s at 1.85 million, but has recovered from a mid-1980s low of under 1.6m. Growth is now concentrated in the suburban areas.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Hamburg".

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