Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the German state of Hesse, in the southern part of the Rhine-Main area around Frankfurt, with about 160,000 inhabitants, the fourth largest city in Hesse. It holds the official title City of Science because of its universities, research institutes and high-technology firms, among them the European space operations centre of the European Space Agency, the satellite agency EUMETSAT and the GSI heavy ion research centre, where darmstadtium and other elements were discovered. Merck, the world's oldest pharmaceutical company, is its largest employer. The name first appears at the end of the eleventh century, the city was chartered in 1330, and from 1567 it was the seat of the landgraves and later the grand dukes of Hesse until 1918. The Mathildenhoehe artists' colony and the Russian Chapel became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021. The dramatist Georg Buchner and the philosopher Ludwig Buchner were born here.