🎨 Art

The Rällinge of Abstatt

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Abstatt

Thirty-nine oversized painted tomcat sculptures scattered across a small Swabian wine town, each hand-decorated by a different local club or business, born from a folk legend about lovesick young men who used to meow under women's windows.

Walk through Abstatt, a small wine-growing town in Baden-Württemberg’s Heilbronn district, and you’ll start noticing them: enormous, brightly painted cat sculptures perched on street corners, outside shops, and clustered thickest in the town’s Bürgerpark. There are 39 of them, and every single one looks different.

Why It’s Interesting

They’re called the Rällinge — “Rälling” being the local Swabian dialect word for a tomcat. The name comes from an old bit of local folklore: young men from Abstatt reportedly used to travel to neighboring villages to court women, meowing under windows to make their presence known, and were teased as “Rällings” — tomcats on the prowl — for it. About 40 years ago, a graphic artist named Horst Schwarz gave the character its now-familiar face. When Abstatt’s Bürgerpark (civic park) opened in 2008, the town turned the mascot into a public art project: two-meter-tall blank cat figures were offered to local clubs, schools, and businesses to design and paint however they liked.

The result is a town-wide open-air gallery with no two cats alike — polka-dotted, floral, striped, painted with local landmarks, sports-club colors, or pure abstract color. Locals treat spotting all 39 as a genuine local pastime, and the sculptures have become Abstatt’s defining piece of civic identity — mentioned by name in the town’s own tourism materials as the thing to look for.

Best Time to Visit

Any time — the sculptures are permanent, outdoor, and free to view year-round. Spring and summer make for the most pleasant walking weather to hunt down cats scattered across town.

Getting There

The heaviest concentration is in the Bürgerpark, at Rathausstraße 30, 74232 Abstatt, right by the town hall. From there, more Rällinge are scattered on ordinary streets throughout town — worth wandering rather than beelining. There’s no train station in Abstatt itself; the nearest regional rail hub is Heilbronn, followed by a short bus ride or drive.

🐿️ Cinnamon was here

Field report

A traveler named Jason wrote to me while he was standing in the middle of this town, which is a first — usually mail finds me on a train, not mid-visit. He wanted weird history, and Abstatt handed me the weirdest thing I've documented all season: giant cats. Thirty-nine of them, each two meters tall, painted a different way by a different local club or shop, standing around the Bürgerpark and scattered through the streets like the town lost a bet.

They're called **Rällinge** — Swabian dialect for a tomcat — after an old local legend: young men from Abstatt used to wander to neighboring villages courting women, meowing under their windows to announce themselves, and got teased as "Rällings" for it. A graphic artist gave the character its face decades ago, and when the Bürgerpark opened in 2008 the town turned it into a public art project instead of a mascot nobody remembers.

I am, on paper, the sort of animal a giant cat should worry me. I climbed one anyway — a floral-patterned one near the park entrance — and reported back to Jason that it did not, in fact, move. Visitors online say the fun is just walking the whole town hunting for them; I agree, though I'd add a squirrel-specific caveat about the first ten seconds near each one.

— Cinnamon 🐿️

📸 Cinnamon's camera roll

Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.

Painted giant tomcat sculptures line the Bürgerpark path in Abstatt

🎨 Art 🛸 Oddity 🤪 Weird 💎 Hidden Gem 🆓 Free 👨‍👩‍👧 Family

Where it is

📜 History

Burg Wildeck

A hilltop castle above the wine town of Abstatt that survived the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years' War, then quietly became a state-run vineyard laboratory breeding new German wine grapes.

📍 Baden-Württemberg, Abstatt 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

🏛️ Museum

Deutsches Elfenbeinmuseum (German Ivory Museum)

Europe's only museum devoted entirely to ivory carving, built into a Baroque castle in the Odenwald town that turned imported tusks into a 250-year craft tradition.

📍 Hesse, Erbach (Odenwald) 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

✨ Experience

Solardraisine Überwaldbahn

A heritage rail line through the Odenwald forest that closed to trains in 1994 and reopened as a self-pedaled, solar-assisted rail-cart route through two tunnels and past four viaducts.

📍 Hesse, Mörlenbach 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day

🌸 Spring 🌻 Summer 🍁 Autumn

🛸 Oddity

Bogardus Plaza Clock

New York City's only hand-wound sidewalk clock — a 1,500-pound, 17-foot cast-iron tower clock built in 1910 for a Michigan jeweler, rescued decades later and installed in Tribeca's Bogardus Plaza, where volunteers still wind it by hand every week.

📍 New York, New York 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Nearby discoveries

🛣️ Roadside

Lucy the Elephant

A six-story elephant-shaped building from 1881 standing on the Jersey Shore — the oldest surviving roadside animal architecture in America, and a National Historic Landmark.

📍 New Jersey, Margate City 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 6423 km away

🏛️ Museum

Star Toys Museum — 14,000 Star Wars Pieces

One man's home turned into perhaps the world's most complete Star Wars museum: 14,000+ figures, models, and a holographic Princess Leia, near Baltimore, by appointment.

📍 Maryland, Linthicum Heights 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 6573 km away

🛸 Oddity

House on the Rock

A retreat built atop a 60-foot rock chimney that spiraled into a fever dream of collections — the world's largest carousel, an Infinity Room, and rooms that defy explanation.

📍 Wisconsin, Spring Green 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day · 7121 km away