Erlangen, Germany

Erlangen sits on the Regnitz River roughly 20 km north of Nuremberg and is home to about 114,000 residents. Huguenot refugees founded the baroque Neustadt here in 1686 after the Edict of Nantes was revoked, and French remained the official language until 1824. The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, founded in 1743, ranks as Bavaria's second-largest university, while the local Siemens operation employs around 25,000 people. Each Whitsun the Bergkirchweih beer festival draws about one million visitors to its kilometer-long beer-hall terrace — and the city still holds a few details worth a closer look.