Wachenheim

Wachenheim an der Weinstraße (formerly called Wachenheim im Speyergau) is a small town in the Bad Dürkheim district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, roughly 1 km south of Bad Dürkheim and 20 km west of Ludwigshafen. It is known above all else for its various businesses in the field of winegrowing, and in particular for Sekt.

Geography

Location

Wachenheim lies in the Middle Haardt at the eastern edge of the Palatinate Forest and is also the seat of the eponymous Verbandsgemeinde, to which also belong the neighbouring places of Friedelsheim, Gönnheim and Ellerstadt, themselves also characterized by winegrowing and also partly by fruitgrowing.

History

Antiquity

The first traces of settlement in the Wachenheim area come from the early Iron Age (550 BC to 1). At this time, Celts were settling in the Upper Rhine Plain area. About 60 BC, Germanic tribes, presumably the Nemetes, pushed into the region and drove the Celts out. The Romans intervened in the disputes between the Germanic peoples and the Celts, and after their victory over Ariovistus (57 BC) subdued the Nemetes and ruled the region for the next 400 years. Under Roman influence, crop farming was improved and also fruitgrowing and winegrowing began. Supposedly running through what is now Wachenheim’s municipal area was a Roman road: from Mußbach along the Haardt and through Rhenish Hesse to Bingen.

Wachenheim (disambiguation)

Wachenheim is a small town in the Bad Dürkheim district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Wachenheim may also refer to:

Wachenheim, Alzey-Worms

Wachenheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Geography

Location

The municipality lies in Rhenish Hesse on the river Pfrimm, a 42.7 km-long left-bank tributary to the Rhine. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Monsheim, whose seat is in the like-named municipality. Wachenheim is nestled in the Zellertal valley region and to the west borders right on the Palatinate at neighbouring Niefernheim, an outlying centre of the municipality of Zellertal. Running the length of the like-named valley is Bundesstraße 47.

Wachenheim is the eastern entrance to the Zellertal, and 1.5 km of the heavily used Bundesstraße 47 lies within the municipality’s limits. In 2006 the Ortsgemeinde and the Verbandsgemeinde strengthened their efforts to do something about the high traffic by working with higher authorities. After a traffic count in 2005, the number of vehicles passing on the B 47 in the Wachenheim area had been found to be roughly 7,000 in 24 hours on average.