For months Bavaria, the home of  ‘Germany's Lourdes', has been preparing to welcome its most famous living son, Pope Benedict XVI. When he arrives on a pastoral visit this weekend, the Pope will be rediscovering a region that combines traditional and modern to generate both economic and cultural vitality

In winter, the twin spires of the Stiftspfarrkirche glisten above the snow-covered roofs of Altötting, the place Pope Benedict has called the "heart of Bavaria". With good eyes you might just glimpse them from the platform of the tiny halt of Heiligenstatt - or "holy place" - a newly reopened stop on the SüdostBayernBahn branch line that meanders through forest and field from the railway junction town of Mühldorf to Burghausen on the Austrian border.

At this time of year the sight is more tricky, the church being obscured by the shimmering maize filling the flood plain of the River Inn. So leave the station and join the Kreuzweg, the Way of the Cross with its 14 shrines recording Christ's Passion, which weaves the five kilometres or so through the late summer crops to the town that is also known as Germany's Lourdes, and the spires soon come into view.

In the centre of Altötting stands an ancient octagonal chapel, dating back to the seventh century, that houses the "black Madonna", a small statue of the Blessed Virgin carved from lime wood some 700 years ago, whose face has darkened from fire, age and hundreds of thousands of votive candles burnt to invoke her intercession. In 1489 a drowned child came back to life after being placed near the statue and for more than half a millennium pilgrims have come to pray to Our Lady of Altötting, to whom many miracles and healings have since been attributed.

On Monday, Pope Benedict will become the latest of these pilgrims when his helicopter touches down on a playing field on the edge of town. He will be beginning the third of a six-day tour of his native Bavaria, which was thrust into the global spotlight on 19 April last year with a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel. Suddenly the world's eyes were on this, the largest and arguably most successful state of the modern German federation. So what makes it tick?

First, Bavaria is big. To the south are the Alps of former rival and ally Austria and of Switzerland, to the west the ancient lands of Swabia, to the north the old lands of Thuringia, more recently part of East Germany, and to the east is Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. During the 1,500 years of their existence, the borders of Bavaria have fluctuated wildly. Today the state includes a part of Swabia (the rest forming the neighbouring state of Baden Württemberg); Franconia that includes cities such as Nuremberg, Bayreuth and Coburg (home to the Queen's great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert) and the Upper Palatinate, which includes Regensburg where the Pope was professor of Dogmatic Theology at the university between 1969 and 1977.

These northern parts of the state tend to be Lutheran with Regensburg lying on the faultline between Protestant and Catholic. But south of this line, in the modern administrative regions of Lower Bavaria and Upper Bavaria (so called because of its Alpine connection), is the core of the state. It is conservative and very Catholic - the universal greeting used by young and old, in supermarkets and schools, is "Grüss Gott" - the greeting of God.

Second, Bavaria is booming. If Altötting is the heart of Bavaria, then Munich, its capital, is the brain behind its success. At the end of the Second World War, some 95 per cent of Bavarians earned their living from the land. Then Siemens, displaced from East Berlin, moved south. Perhaps some Prussian punctuality came too and, coupled with a Bavarian disdain for flimflam and desire for straight talking, set the ball rolling. Today the state, and Munich in particular, is an industrial and technological powerhouse, home not just to Siemens, BMW, the truck- and bus-maker MAN and the insurance giant Allianz, but to hundreds of telecommunications and IT firms, to scores of film and TV production companies and to burgeoning biotech industries that put it on a par with Cambridge. Artists and writers, particularly those of caustic Bavarian satire, are in plentiful supply, and there is a sophisticated transfer of knowledge from academia to commerce.

With Germany's lowest unemployment rate, high salaries and educational excellence, Bavarians have prospered from what the state's conservative ruling CSU party calls a policy of "laptops and lederhosen" - combining the economically new with the politically traditional, as exemplified by the unembarrassed wearing of short leather shorts or collarless jackets and small feathered hats. The combination appears to work, as people are fiercely proud of their heritage, with many if not most regarding themselves as Bavarian before being German.

In the English-speaking world, after so many decades of anti-German propaganda, such nationalistic fervour can sometimes be regarded with suspicion. Munich, the place of failed appeasement, was to have a Third Reich makeover to rival Berlin's. To the south of the city, in the now golf-course-manicured Bavarian Alps, lies Berchtesgaden, Hitler's hilltop hideaway obliterated by the Americans at the end of the war, while nearer to the north of the city is Dachau, whose name on a motorway signboard can still send a shiver down the spine.

But Bavarians can be radical risk-takers. One of the key players in the plot to assassinate Hitler was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg from the south-west of the state, while Hans and Sophie Scholl were students at Munich University when they led the White Rose resistance movement before being caught and guillotined by the Gestapo. Both the Scholls and von Stauffenberg were inspired by their Catholicism.

Bavaria has been home to many writers, musicians, painters and film-makers, such as Bertolt Brecht, Richards Wagner and Strauss, Albrecht Dürer, and Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It has also housed such scientists as Max Plank, Werner Heisenberg and Wilhelm Röntgen, and inventors such as Rudolf Diesel, not to mention the neurologist Alois Alzheimer. But currently its most famous son is Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.

It was drizzling and the streets were empty just before 6 p.m. local time on 19 April last year in the small town of Marktl am Inn, a few kilometres east of Altötting. The man who had just been elected the 264th successor to St Peter was born in a house at the end of the marketplace 78 years and three days earlier. By the time the new Pope appeared on the Vatican balcony, a crowd was gathering. Following a celebratory Mass, an evening of free beer and Bavarian music followed, and Marktl, along with much of the rest of Bavaria, has hardly stopped celebrating since.

Although Pope Benedict, fulfilling an engagement of his predecessor, attended World Youth Day in Cologne last year, his pastoral visit to Bavaria, which begins today, Saturday, when the papal plane touches down at Munich's Franz Josef Strauss airport at 3.30 p.m. local time, will be a chance for Germans and particularly Bavarians to honour one of their own. On the red carpet to welcome the pontiff will be head of the German state, President Horst Köhler; head of the German Government, Chancellor Angela Merkel; head of the Bavarian Government, Edmund Stoiber; and a couple of cardinals, Archbishop of Munich and Freising Friedrich Wetter, and chairman of the German bishops' conference, Karl Lehman.

The Pope will process through the city that he served as archbishop from 1977 to 1982 and tomorrow will say Mass before thousands in the open air of the Munich Trade Centre. On Monday he visits Altötting with a side trip to Marktl before flying on to Regensburg, former capital of Bavaria, home to the parliament of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of the finest intact medieval cities in Europe.

On the last day of his visit, Pope Benedict flies to Freising where he is due to pray in front of the shrine to the eighth-century saint Corbinian, whose symbol of a saddled bear Benedict has incorporated into his coat of arms. Corbinian established the bishopric of Freising, which fell vacant at his death in 730 until the German apostle, St Boniface, the feller of Thor's Oak who was born in Devon more than 1,300 years ago, confirmed Corbinian's brother Erembert to the see.

Pope Benedict flies out of Munich just as thousands arrive for the gross indulgence that is the Oktoberfest, avoided by some though by no means all beer-loving Bavarians. But one can't help thinking that the pontiff may have shared a glass or two with his brother Georg during their private time together on Wednesday. After all, Freising boasts the oldest brewery in the world, set up in 1040 by the Benedictine monks of the Weihenstephan monastery; and what could be more Bavarian than sitting in a beer garden, under chestnut trees planted to shade the cellars below, and shooting the breeze, theological or otherwise?

Michael Holland is a former comment editor of The Observer.

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