Hotel Froschkoenig Kassel

If you like climbing high and...

by kywildcat

If you like climbing high and looking down I'd suggest you'll go up the the 'Herkules'.
This monuments sits on top of the 'Karlsberg', 550 meters above the city.
In 1701 Giovanni Francesco Guerniero from Italy planned to build a 'Temple of the winds' on top of this mountain.
The whole structure is 71 meters in height and can only be reached by the stairways going up to it.
Once up there the view is truly breathtaking!

Opera in Kassel

by Nemorino

When I went to Kassel recently to see the opera Il trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), I was afraid I might be disappointed because I had just seen the same opera a few weeks before in a spectacular open-air production on the lakeside at Bregenz, Austria.

But I needn't have worried. The Kassel production was very different and of course much more intimate, but just as good in its own way.

The photo at the top of this page is a legal one, by the way, since I took it before the performance started. As the audience came in, the stage was already in full view -- there is no curtain, anyway -- and several eerie figures wearing long black coats and gas masks were walking slowly around the stage, setting the mood for the coming opera scenes.

Since the unsightly 45-year-old State Theater (Staatstheater) is currently undergoing a much-needed refurbishment, operas are now presented in a colorful and very attractive temporary theater called the Kuppeltheater, which has been set up like a circus tent on the Friedrichsplatz in the center of Kassel.

The Kuppeltheater has 890 seats (as opposed to 6,800 in Bregenz), but it was nowhere near full on the weekday evening when I was there.

Kassel is a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, located on the Fulda River in the northern part of Hessen.

Not to be confused with Kassel, which is a small ex-village in the Spessart hills 206 kilometers to the south. To get from this one to that one, take the regional bicycle route R1 south to Fulda (140 km). Then take the R3 to Wirtheim (about 66 km) and turn left.