L Ü N E B U R G

The Hanseatic city of Lüneburg is a large medium-sized town in the northeast of Lower Saxony and one of nine major centres of the federal state. The city on the Ilmenau lies about 50 kilometres southeast of Hamburg on the edge of the Lüneburg Heath and belongs to the Hamburg metropolitan region. Lüneburg lies only about 15 kilometres south of the state borders of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. With its 77,500 inhabitants, the district town of the district of the same name has the status of a large independent town. Lüneburg is the seat of Leuphana University, a member of the Lüneburg Landscape Association and was the seat of the administrative district of the same name until the end of 2004. This was then replaced by a government representative and in 2014 by the current regional representatives for the north-eastern Lower Saxony.