Tutti dicono quanto sia perfetta Heidelberg e io sono d’accordo. Ma sono curioso: come reagiscono le persone che vivono qui all’afflusso quotidiano di migliaia di turisti?
Diventa fastidioso nella vita di tutti i giorni (mezzi pubblici, shopping, mercato immobiliare) o semplicemente ci si abitua? Hai qualche punto di fuga quando è troppo pieno?
Mi piacerebbe sentire il tuo punto di vista onesto come residente!
https://i.redd.it/i8k0arq4hjfh1.jpeg
di wurst_und_ei
20 commenti
Staying away from the main road if possible. There‘re many parts of Heidelberg that aren‘t overcrowded.
Also Heidelberg is nice but overrated
Outside Hauptstraße and Schloss it is really not that bad
This is like 10% of the city and the rest doesnt even look like this.
I would guess less than 10% of Heidelbergs inhabitants live in the old town.
The rest of Heidelberg is quiet unremarkable. So people live like they do in any other germany city.
Well the most locals just move out of the old town. You can observe this with the shops in the Hauptstraße. A lot of them now are designed for tourists than locals comparing to 10-15 years ago.
Using the parallel street, Plöck.
As others pointed out, its just the Hauptstraße, also its much more vacant during weekdays. You can always take the parallel streets.
I personally never felt that “Man, too many tourists, there should be less.”
Never bothered me.
dream City?? is boring as f
It’s seldom as extreme as this but it’s also only one single (main) street.
Like any popular tourist destination. Locals avoid those parts of the city. Consciously or not.
Most probably, outside of the historical center thats not so bad. And all of these folks are bringing money, hence it is OK to deal with this.
Out of curiosity as a non-local, have tourist crowds gotten larger in recent years? Have the feeling that Heidelberg really got even more well-known in the past years with tourists and expats.
As someone who went to university in Heidelberg for two years – it’s manageable.
Yeah, I’d get annoyed and pretty overwhelmed trying to walk from Bismarckplatz to the uni library on a Saturday afternoon because the crowd down the Hauptstraße would be INSANE. And walking across the Alte Brücke to get to the bus stop. And in Christmas market times getting around the old town for class was a hassle. But apart from that, you really wouldn’t encounter crowds like that in other places in the city. It’s for the most part really quite calm and idyllic, and not more touristy/crowded than other cities that size.
First rule of Heidelberg: don’t go to Hauptstraße on the weekend. When I was a student without regular working hours, I’d sometimes forget it was Saturday and face a rude awakening. On other days I’d actually enjoy looking around the shops after class, it’s really no worse than any other city. What always fascinated me though was that the Hare Krishnas got the permit to do their chariot festival on Hauptstrasse on a Saturday that too in summer.
Oh I used to live in on of the buildings in this picture. The nostalgia! The crowds are really only just there on the weekends. Plus took me like 2 min to go to my classes at uni from here
It is more or less one street that looks like this on summer weekends.
I’ve been to Heidelberg several times for business, and it is a lot less crowded during weekdays outside of the summer holidays.
Just go down the next street instead.
To avoid crowds I go everywhere by bike and go early in the morning, preferably working days. Then it’s ok.
It does not get annoying imo
> Everyone says how perfect Heidelberg is
I don’t. It’s worth a visit, but while the castle is impressive, the city is really not that special. It’s just one of the few that have found their way into most guidebooks and now travel Instagram feeds and YouTube videos. It’s probably a fairytale experience if you come from a country that doesn’t have cities that look like that, but so would most German cities that still have intact historic quarters be, and that’s a *lot*.
> how do people who actually live here deal with the daily influx of thousands of tourists?
It’s usually manageable because it’s often only one part of the historic centre that gets crowded like this, so locals just avoid it. There are places where overtourism has become such a headache for the locals that they actively try to discourage visitors, but I don’t think Heidelberg is quite at that point yet.
Which isn’t to say that locals are especially *happy* about the situation: there are, as you can see, homes and businesses on that street, and having tourists take it over means that locals are pressured into moving away from that area. Airbnb has also caused a lot of issues by removing a lot of apartments from the housing market, again especially in the centre. But there are worse places for this kind of thing (Prague springs to mind), and most of the time Heidelberg doesn’t actually look like that. Plus, the city has long been a tourist attraction, so it has become used to managing the crowds.