The town is dusted with 72,000 tons of tiny diamonds, measuring at largest about 0.3 mm, according to American magazine Travel+Leisure.
The diamonds were created when an asteroid struck this part of Bavaria in southern Germany about 15 million years ago. The impact formed the Nördlingen Ries, a massive crater more than 14 km (9 miles) wide that still dominates the surrounding landscape and is now the site of the town of Nördlingen, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
|
St. Georg Dom in Nördlingen, Germany. Photo via Tripadvisor |
Residents of Nördlingen were unaware of the vast diamond deposit until the 1960s, when American geologists Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao arrived to survey the area.
For centuries, residents had no idea that the stones used to build their homes and public buildings contained microscopic diamonds.
One of the town’s best-known landmarks, St. Georgs Church, was constructed entirely from suevite and is estimated to contain around 5,000 carats of diamonds. The crystals, however, are extraordinarily small, giving them no commercial value, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
A good place for visitors to start exploring the town is the Ries Crater Museum, which regularly offers guided tours and displays specimens from the Ries crater as well as impact craters from other parts of the world and even beyond Earth.