Konstanz, Germany

Konstanz is a German city of roughly 85,000 residents on the shores of Lake Constance, making it the largest city on the lake and sitting directly on the Swiss border. The 1414 to 1418 Council of Constance ended the Western Schism and condemned Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake here in 1415. On the harbour pier, the 18-metre Imperia statue by Peter Lenk rotates slowly above the water, its outstretched figures mocking the clerics of that council. The 11th-century Konstanz Minster displays a Renaissance façade completed in 1613. The city survived the Second World War largely intact because residents left the lights on, leading Allied bombers to mistake it for neutral Switzerland.