The Great Vat in the Heidelberg Castle cellar holds 221,726 litres of wine and has been filled fewer than four times. That ratio of ambition to use describes the whole hill. Schloss Heidelberg was never a single building. It is a sedimentary record of Palatine rule, begun in the thirteenth century, extended by Elector Ottheinrich in the 1550s, and left half-ruined after French troops mined its towers in 1689 and 1693. Lightning finished the argument in 1764. The castle was never rebuilt. That decision made it famous. Nineteenth-century Romantics — Turner among them — found in the broken walls exactly what a finished palace could not offer. The English Wing stands roofless. The Powder Tower sits split open, one half slumped toward the Neckar, its masonry three metres thick and still legible in section. Visitors on a heidelberg and rhine valley day trip from frankfurt see a ruin that was preserved as a ruin, deliberately, from the 1800s onward. Below, the Altstadt runs 1.6 kilometres along the river, Germany's longest pedestrian shopping street threading past the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Alte Brücke of 1788. Heidelberg University, founded 1386, remains the oldest in the country; its Student Prison still carries graffiti from the 1780s onward. The Ottheinrich Wing façade, with its tiered sculpture programme of biblical and classical figures, is regarded as the earliest substantial Renaissance work north of the Alps. Sixty kilometres northwest, the Rhine Gorge tells a parallel story in stone. The Upper Middle Rhine Valley, UNESCO-listed in 2002, compresses forty castles into 65 kilometres of river between Bingen and Koblenz — Rheinstein, Pfalzgrafenstein on its midstream island, Marksburg never destroyed. Terraced Riesling vineyards climb slopes at gradients approaching sixty degrees. The Lorelei rock rises 132 metres above the narrowest, deepest reach of the waterway. The pairing is not arbitrary. Both landscapes were manufactured by the same Romantic gaze, and both were saved by tourism before conservation existed as a discipline. Rüdesheim, the usual river gateway, built its reputation on the same trade. Modern heidelberg and rhine valley day trip from frankfurt tours retrace a nineteenth-century itinerary almost unchanged in structure. Admission to the castle complex is 11 EUR, covering the courtyard, the barrel cellar, the German Pharmacy Museum and the funicular. The site opens 09:00–18:00, seven days a week. Roughly 400 steps are involved in full access to the terraces and cellar levels.