Every design for Ingolstadt

Ingolstadt spreads across both banks of the Danube in a wide, flat basin, bordered by the foothills of the Franconian Jura, with the Donaumoos to the south-west and the river's lowland forests – the second-largest hardwood floodplain on the Danube – reaching into the city from the east.

Walking through the old town, you sense how much of the past survived. Ingolstadt was one of the capitals of the Bavarian duchies alongside Munich, Landshut and Straubing, and its architecture still shows it, from the Kreuztor to the Neues Schloss and the Liebfrauenmünster. On 13 March 1472 it became the seat of Bavaria's first university, later a centre of the Counter-Reformation, and the freethinking Illuminati were founded here in 1776. For more than 400 years the city was a Bavarian state fortress. Today it is shaped above all by car-making and mechanical engineering, which the Museum Mobile puts on show, and it is the second-largest German city on the Danube after Regensburg.

For anyone who grew up here, the map traces familiar ground: the Kreuztor, the Liebfrauenmünster, the Neues Schloss and the long bend of the Danube where every summer seemed to end.