5 Days in Nuremberg

Nuremberg Castle is really three castles in one: the Imperial Castle (Kaiserburg) of the Holy Roman emperors, the older Burgraves' castle beside it, and the buildings the city council added on the east side after it bought the ruins in 1427. Medieval German kings and emperors stayed here, many of them more than once. The Golden Bull of 1356 named Nuremberg as the place where every newly elected king had to hold his first diet, which made the city a kind of unofficial capital of the empire.

The full ticket covers the Palas with its double chapel, the Imperial Castle Museum, the Deep Well (guided, and included) and the Sinwell Tower, with its panorama over the roofs. The castle was badly damaged in 1944-45 (only the double chapel and the Sinwell Tower came through almost unharmed) and rebuilt in the historic forms, so much of it is reconstruction.

A few minutes downhill from the castle gate is the house where Albrecht Dürer lived and worked from 1509 until his death in 1528. It's a tall half-timbered building from around 1420 that Dürer bought from the heirs of an astronomer, and it has been a museum since 1871. He was born in Nuremberg in 1471, the son of a goldsmith from Hungary, and became famous across Europe for his prints, including the 1515 rhinoceros woodcut he made without ever having seen the animal.

Go for the house and the workshop rather than for famous paintings: furnished rooms, a re-created printmaking workshop and printing demonstrations on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum on day three has some of his work too.

Walk down to the Rathausplatz for the dish the city is known for. The Nuremberg Rostbratwurst is tiny, 7 to 9 cm and 20 to 25 grams, and it's protected under EU rules: only sausages made inside the city limits, to the traditional recipe, can carry the name. The city council was already writing the recipe into law in 1313. Order them by the half dozen or more on a pewter plate with sauerkraut or potato salad, or do it the street way, drei im Weggla, three in a bread roll with mustard.

Röslein is the busy option, but it's right on the square. Try Saure Zipfel at least once, sausages poached in a vinegar and onion broth.

The Sebalduskirche is the oldest of Nuremberg's three big churches. Building started in 1225, and it was a Romanesque basilica with two choirs before the Gothic changes of the 14th century. It's named after Saint Sebaldus, an 8th-century hermit and the city's patron saint, whose shrine is inside, along with works by Veit Stoss and the epitaph of the Tucher family. Johann Pachelbel, of the Canon, was the organist here from 1695 to 1706.

Look at the outside as well. High on the wall is a Judensau, a carving from the 1380s that mocks Jews, one of the antisemitic sculptures put on German churches in the Middle Ages. The same hatred shaped the story of the square you're about to walk into.

The Hauptmarkt is the center of the city, and the way to read it is to know what was here before. Until 1349 this was the Jewish quarter. In the pogrom of 1349, which came with the Black Death, hundreds of Nuremberg's Jews were killed, and Emperor Charles IV ordered the synagogue torn down to make room for a market square. The Frauenkirche was built on the site between 1352 and 1362.

At noon every day, the mechanical clock on its facade, the Männleinlaufen, comes to life: seven electors parade past the emperor in memory of the Golden Bull. It dates from 1509. In the square, the 19 m Gothic spire of the Schöner Brunnen, the Beautiful Fountain, was built by Heinrich Beheim in 1385-96 and carries 40 figures in four rows. Tradition says to turn the ring in its railing for luck. From 1933 to 1945 the square was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz and used for marches, which sets up tomorrow.

Nuremberg stands on soft sandstone, and for centuries the city dug cellars into it, up to four floors deep, to keep beer cool. The Historic Rock-Cut Cellars (Historische Felsengänge) are open on guided tours of about an hour. It's 8-10 °C down there. The Rotbier tour (daily at 5:30pm, 5:45pm on Fridays and Saturdays) is in German with an English audio guide (1 EUR plus a deposit); the public English tour runs only on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:10am. It ends next door in the Altstadthof brewery with a small tasting.

Stay for dinner. Nuremberg is the home of Rotbier, red beer. The Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, an organic brewery and whisky distillery at Bergstraße 19, brews it bottom-fermented, slowly and cold, and its restaurant and Rotbierstüberl are open every day into the evening. Order the Rotbier, a Franconian main and, if you like whisky, ask about the organic single malt.

The Documentation Center sits in the northwest wing of the unfinished Congress Hall, a horseshoe of brick and granite that the Nazis planned for 50,000 party members and never put a roof on. The Nazis made Nuremberg the City of the Reich Party Rallies, and the party held its rally here every year from 1933 to 1938. They were propaganda events, staged to link the movement to the old imperial city, and the Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship were announced at the 1935 rally.

The museum shows how it worked and where it led. Architect Günther Domenig drove a diagonal glass and steel walkway through the building (opened in 2001). A new permanent exhibition, Nuremberg and the Nazi Party Rallies, has been in trial operation since May 2026, and the whole building is open again for the first time since 2020.

After the museum, walk around the building. The Congress Hall reached 39 m of a planned 68.5 m, with a brick body behind a granite facade that Nazi propaganda compared to the Colosseum, and its footprint is about 275 by 265 m. From it the Great Road runs south, a granite parade avenue finished in 1939 for rallies that never happened, because the war started first. The pit of the planned German Stadium, with room for over 400,000 spectators, filled with groundwater and became the Silbersee.

You can't walk onto the Zeppelin Field or the grandstand at the moment. The city is securing the crumbling structure, with the grandstand due to reopen from September 2028 and the field in early 2031, according to the Documentation Center. It's where the Americans blew the swastika off the top in 1945, and where the city blew up the grandstand's colonnade in 1967.

The Großer Dutzendteich is the lake the Rally Grounds were laid out around. Gutmann is a classic lakeside Wirtshaus, a Franconian inn with its own brewery. It opens at 10 (Monday to Saturday until 11pm, Sunday until 10pm), serves breakfast until noon and hot food from 11.

The house has a wheat-beer room, the Weizenstube, so a Weizenbier is the natural order, with a Schnitzel, the breaded cutlet every German inn lists, usually with potato salad or fries. After this morning, the lake is the right place to sit for a while."

Take the U1 to Bärenschanze, the stop for the Palace of Justice. The International Military Tribunal of the Nuremberg Trials opened in this building on 20 November 1945 and tried 22 leading Nazis, one of them, Martin Bormann, in absentia. Nuremberg was chosen partly because it was the city of the rallies and of the racial laws. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, ten were hanged on 16 October 1946 and Göring killed himself the day before. Three were acquitted and seven imprisoned. Twelve further trials, run by the United States against doctors, judges and SS officers, followed until 1949.

The exhibition sits in the attic above the courtroom and is documentary and restrained, with film, audio and part of the original dock. The main exhibit is Courtroom 600 itself, used for ordinary trials until March 2020.

Back in the old town, spend the early evening along the Pegnitz, which is the most photogenic stretch of the city. Weißgerbergasse, the Tanners' Lane, was the old craftsmen's quarter, and about twenty medieval half-timbered houses survived the bombing here. It's now full of cafés, small bars and workshops. Nearby, the Weinstadel is a former wine depot with two half-timbered floors on a sandstone ground floor, and the Henkersteg, the Hangman's Bridge, crosses the river toward the flea market square.

A little downstream is the Kettensteg, an iron chain footbridge from 1824 that is often billed as the oldest surviving chain bridge on the European continent (a claim historians dispute). Walk it at dusk when the lights come on over the water.

Finish with the dish that Franconians would put next to the sausage: Schäufele, a pork shoulder roasted with a crackling crust and served with a dumpling and a dark gravy. The Goldenes Posthorn was first documented in 1498, was destroyed in the bombing near the end of the war and was rebuilt around 1960, and it serves bratwurst and oven-fresh Schäufele. The terrace looks straight at the Sebalduskirche.

Pair the pork with a Franconian white wine or a beer from the Tucher brewery, which the Posthorn also pours.

After two days of the past, start in the future. The Deutsches Museum Nürnberg is a museum about what comes next: work and daily life, body and technology, smart cities, mobility, climate and space. It's hands-on, with a self-driving car simulator, a quantum computer, humanoid robots and VR, and it's the best option here for teenagers.

The Lorenzkirche dominates the southern half of the walled city. The nave was finished around 1400 and the hall choir between 1439 and 1477. Inside, find Veit Stoss's Angelic Salutation, a carved Annunciation that hangs in the choir, and Adam Kraft's tabernacle, a stone tower of almost 20 m that includes a figure of Kraft himself.

The church turned Lutheran in 1525, but the rich families refused to let their donated art be removed, which is why so much of it survived the Reformation. It was badly damaged in the Second World War and restored. On the way out, look at the Tugendbrunnen, the Fountain of Virtues, on the north side.

Walk north to the Hauptmarkt for a quick lunch. The Franconian pretzel is a Brezen, and Brezen Kolb, a local bakery chain with a branch at Hauptmarkt 11, sells them with butter and chives. A minute away, at Plobenhofstraße 6, Lebkuchen Schmidt is the best known of the gingerbread makers.

Nuremberg Lebkuchen is a protected product: only gingerbread baked inside the city limits can carry the name, and the top grade, Elisenlebkuchen, can have no more than 10 percent flour and at least 25 percent nuts. The first gingerbread baker here is documented in 1395. Ask for Lebkuchen-Bruch, the broken pieces, which taste the same and cost less.

Founded in 1852, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum is Germany's largest museum of cultural history, partly housed in a former Carthusian monastery. The collection runs from prehistory to the present, with works by Dürer, Rembrandt and Kirchner and a lot of everyday objects. Its most famous object is the Erdapfel, made in Nuremberg in 1492, the world's oldest surviving globe, with a world that has no Americas on it.

Don't try to see everything, and check the floor plan at the desk, because parts of the permanent collection are closed for renovation. Right outside is the Straße der Menschenrechte, the Way of Human Rights, by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan (opened 1993): 27 concrete pillars, each 8 m tall, each inscribed with one article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in German and another language.

The Hospital of the Holy Spirit was founded in 1332-39 by Konrad Gross, then the richest man in town, to look after the old and the sick, and it became the city's largest welfare institution. Part of it was built over the bed of the Pegnitz, which is why the restaurant sits right over the water. The imperial regalia were kept in the hospital church from 1424 to 1796.

Today it is a Franconian restaurant and wine tavern with down-to-earth regional cooking and a long list of local wines, open every day from 11:30 to 23:00 with the kitchen closing at 22:00. Franconia is beer country that also makes wine, mostly dry whites sold in the flat Bocksbeutel bottle. Ask what the roast of the day is, and read the Sauerbraten entry in What to Eat and Drink.

Bamberg is built over seven hills, each with a church, which earned it the nickname Franconian Rome. The cathedral stands on the Domberg, the Cathedral Hill. Emperor Henry II founded it and it was consecrated in 1012, but the building you see is the late Romanesque cathedral finished in the 13th century, with four towers about 81 m high. Inside are the marble tomb of Henry II and his wife Kunigunde, carved by Tilman Riemenschneider between 1499 and 1513, the tomb of Pope Clement II and the Bamberg Horseman, a famous medieval equestrian statue.

Across the square, the Neue Residenz, whose Baroque front wing went up in 1697-1703, was the prince-bishops' palace, and its rose garden has a view over the roofs of the town. The Alte Hofhaltung, the older court with Renaissance wings, stands opposite.

Walk down the hill and across the Obere Brücke to the Altes Rathaus, the old town hall, which was built right into the river Regnitz between two bridges. It was given its Baroque and Rococo look in 1744-56.

Walk a few minutes along the river to Klein Venedig, Little Venice, a row of 19th-century fishermen's houses right on the water. The Market Gardeners' District, where people have grown vegetables inside the city since the Middle Ages, is part of the World Heritage Site too.

Bamberg is a serious brewing town, and its signature drink is Rauchbier, smoked beer, made from malt dried over beechwood fire. The Schlenkerla, the historic smoked-beer brewery at Dominikanerstraße 6, still taps it from oak barrels in an old tavern. The first sip is often compared to smoked ham, and not everybody likes it. Give it a full glass before deciding.

The Schlenkerla is open every day from 9:30 to 23:30 with the kitchen running from 11 to 22, and the garden in the Dominikanerhof is open from Easter to October, weather permitting. A late lunch works fine.

Climb the Michaelsberg, one of the seven hills, to the former Benedictine abbey, whose church is a 12th-century Romanesque building. The hill gives you views over the roofs of the old town. The abbey's old brewery is now the Franconian Brewery Museum, with around 1,000 square meters of vaults and more than 1,850 exhibits that follow beer from the barley field to the glass, from the brew house to the malt house and the ice cellar.

If you're a beer person, this is where the Franconian love of the drink starts to make sense. If you're not, the view alone is worth the climb.

Finish with a beer cellar on the Stephansberg hill, another of Bamberg's seven. The Spezial-Keller pours the beer of Brauerei Spezial, the other main smoked-beer brewery in town, and it looks over the World Heritage town, the cathedral and the Michaelsberg. It's the classic Franconian Keller setup: a big beer garden under old plane trees in summer, a cozy tiled-stove taproom in winter, and simple regional food.

Order the Rauchbier or one of the unsmoked beers. Try to be up here while there's still light for the view (after 25 October the sun sets around 5pm), and be on a train back to Nuremberg before it gets late.

The Johannisfriedhof, about a 15-minute walk west of Dürer's house, started in 1234 as a leper hospice outside the walls, and got its burial ground in 1238. After Emperor Maximilian I ordered in 1518 that burials be moved outside the walls, it became where the citizens of the Sebald parish were buried. Walk the rows of graves with their bronze epitaphs and find Dürer's grave, the one most visitors come for. Veit Stoss, Willibald Pirckheimer and the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach are buried here too.

It's calm and green, and worth slowing down for.

Walk back toward the castle for the city's own museum, in a Renaissance merchant's house at Burgstraße 15. It tells about 950 years of Nuremberg's history in a multimedia tour, with rooms from the Homann map publishers' workshop and Baroque stucco ceilings. The part that fits this week best is the exhibit Crown. Power. History, with replicas of the Holy Roman Empire's regalia, the crown jewels that Nuremberg guarded for nearly four centuries. They are now in Vienna, which is why the city shows copies.

Walk south across the old town to Zirkelschmiedsgasse 26, to the Historic Bratwurstküche Zum gulden Stern. The sausages are grilled over a beechwood fire. It's open every day from 11 to 22, with the kitchen closing at 21:30.

If you ate at the Röslein on day one, this is the comparison lunch. Order a plate of six and a Rotbier. The Handwerkerhof, the craft village by the Königstor near the station, was built in 1971 and is aimed at visitors; it's fine for gifts, but eat here instead."

Since the Middle Ages Nuremberg has been known as a toy city, with hundreds of toy firms making wooden toys, tin figures, doll kitchens and above all tin toys. Today the city hosts the biggest toy fair in the world, and the Toy Museum on Karlstraße tells the story from old dolls' houses to toys since 1945.

It's a good surprise for adults as well as children, and an hour is enough.

For the last tour, go back under the castle hill. At the start of the war, the city turned former beer cellars here, about 24 m below the surface, into a shelter for its art, with drainage, heating and ventilation systems. It's the same sandstone as the cellars on day one. Altarpieces, sculptures and works from the churches and museums waited out the bombing in these vaults, among them Veit Stoss's Angelic Salutation from the Lorenzkirche, the Männleinlaufen clock from the Frauenkirche and works by Dürer. The imperial regalia were here too: Hitler had them brought from Vienna in 1938, they were shown in the Katharinenkirche, and US soldiers found them in the bunker in 1945.

The tour, in the original guard rooms, with a film and photographs, shows what was lost above and what was saved below. It's guided only.

For the last night, leave the old town for the pub of the Schanzenbräu brewery at Adam-Klein-Straße 27, west of the walls. Its beers are all unfiltered, with a Rotbier, a Helles, a Pils and seasonal specials, and the pub serves the classics: bratwurst, Schnitzel, Käsespätzle, which are cheese noodles from neighboring Swabia, and plates of cold cuts.

It's an unceremonious end to a week of heavy history, and a good place to finish.