The Bastei is a row of sandstone pinnacles standing 194 metres above the Elbe in Saxony, in eastern Germany, and a stone bridge of seven arches runs from one tower to the next. It was built in 1851, and it crosses a ravine that drops forty metres straight below the parapet. The name means bastion, after the lookout that once guarded the river below. Halfway over, the towers close in on both sides of you and the valley falls away. The terrace at the far end has the river curling below it, the flat-topped Lilienstein across the water, pine forest to the horizon. The roofs of Rathen and its little ferry are almost two hundred metres under your feet. The bridge itself is not visible from the bridge. For that you walk out to the Ferdinandstein, a small rock just beyond it, which is the angle behind nearly every photograph ever taken here.
Iron footbridges lead off the far side into Felsenburg Neurathen, a medieval castle that used the towers as its walls. Timber rooms and walkways were wedged between the pillars, and the sockets cut to hold their beams are still there in the rock, along with carved chambers, passages and a deep cistern. Marked stairways drop from the bridge down through the sandstone maze to Rathen, a car-free spa village on the Elbe reached by passenger ferry, and they pass between high walls and quiet ravines that the crowds up top never see. On cool mornings the fog settles into those ravines and only the towers show above it. Romantic painters walked up from the river two centuries ago to draw them, Caspar David Friedrich among them, and their route is now a marked path of 116 kilometres called the Malerweg, the painters' way. The same sandstone was quarried just downstream and floated to Dresden, so the towers you crossed and the domes of the Frauenkirche are one rock.