A stud farm valley that cradled the automobile
Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg's Neckar capital, spills across vineyard hills and park valleys as Germany's automobile cradle. Old High German Stuotgarten—mare garden—still echoes in Swabian Schduagert spoken in the basin by residents who nickname their city the Swabian metropolis.
Farmers have worked the rich Neckar soils here since the seventh millennium BC. Rome took the area in AD 83 and around 90 built a large fort at what is now Bad Cannstatt, guarding vineyards and the road linking Mainz with Augsburg in the province of Germania Superior. A civilian town and a skilled brickworks grew beside it, but when the Alamanni pushed Rome back across the Rhine and Danube in the third century, the settlement drops out of sight until the seventh. Frankish farmers later tilled the same fields, and a St. Gall abbey record names Cannstatt on the Neckar in 708.
Stuttgart proper began in 950, when Duke Liudolf of Swabia, son of Emperor Otto I, set up a stud farm for cavalry horses in the Nesenbach valley about 5 kilometres south of the old fort during the Hungarian invasions. He lost the duchy four years later after a failed revolt against his father. Bruno of Calw built the forerunner of the Old Castle in 1089, vines are documented from 1108, and a Hirsau Abbey register of around 1160 mentions a Hugo de Stuokarten. Long overshadowed by Cannstatt's trade crossroads, the town received its charter in 1320.
Today the city sits in the Stuttgarter Kessel, a basin within about an hour's reach of both the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura, with 613,111 residents in 2023, the sixth-largest in Germany, and nearly 5.5 million in the metro region. Its hills, some covered with vines, make it unusual among German cities.
It calls itself the cradle of the automobile and hosts the Mercedes-Benz and Porsche museums. Porsche, Bosch and the Mercedes-Benz Group have headquarters here, and the city claims the highest general prosperity of any German city. Its stock exchange is second only to Frankfurt, LBBW is the country's biggest Landesbank, and the region is also among Europe's most congested.
Source: Stuttgart
