Nördlingen (German: [ˈnœʁt.lɪŋ.ən] ⓘ; Swabian: Nearle or Nearleng) is a town in the Donau-Ries district, in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, with a population of approximately 20,674.

Today it is one of very few towns in Germany that still have completely intact city walls—joining the ranks of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Dinkelsbühl and Berching, all of them in Bavaria.

Another attraction in the town is Saint George's Church's 90-metre (300 ft) steeple, called "Daniel," which is made of a suevite impact breccia that contains shocked quartz.

Other notable buildings are the town hall (which dates to the 13th century), St. Salvator church and the Spital, a former medieval hospital.

The latter has panoramas, magic lanterns, silent films, barrel organs, pianolas, music boxes and gramophones.

Finds in the Ofnet Caves near the city show that the site of present-day Nördlingen was already inhabited in the late Palaeolithic.

In the Large Ofnet, in 1908 archaeologist R. R. Schmidt found two dish-shaped pits in which human skulls were lying "like eggs in flat baskets".

The Alemannic people occupied the Nördlingen area during the 6th and 7th centuries, during which time the region was gradually Christianized under the Merovingian dynasty, and several burial grounds from this period have been discovered.

In a document dating to 1219, the Nördlinger Pfingstmesse ("Nördlingen Pentecost fair") was first mentioned, an event which continues as a folk festival in the city to the present day.

The associated 40 parchment pages in the Nördlingen city archives give unique insight into the conditions of a brothel in this time period.

Between 1589 and 1598, 34 women and one man were burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft, and one co-defendant midwife, Barbara Lierheimer, died while in custody.

[12] Nördlingen served as the site of two historic battles, and marked a turning point in the Thirty Years' War.

In the first Battle of Nördlingen in 1634, the Swedish Protestant forces were decisively defeated for the first time by the imperial Habsburg troops.

The city was compelled to open its gates to the victors, but was not plundered by the victorious troops after high reparations payments.

In the early 18th century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the city was further affected by the impact of nearby battles of Höchstädt.

The synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis during the November pogrom of 1938, and this is commemorated by a plaque on today's Protestant parish hall.

In the course of the municipal reorganization of Bavaria, Nördlingen lost its status as a city on July 1, 1972 and was incorporated into the newly formed district Nördlingen-Donauwörth, which received its current name, Donau-Ries, on May 1, 1973.

The meteorite impact—from a 1 km-wide (0.6 mi) asteroid—that caused the Nördlinger Ries crater created an estimated 72,000 tons of these tiny diamonds when it impacted a local graphite deposit.