Frankfurt

Top things to do in Frankfurt

1. 01

   Roemerberg and the Roemer - the rebuilt medieval square

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The crooked half-timbered row facing the old town hall is a postwar reconstruction of a square the March 1944 raids erased, and it is done well enough that most visitors never notice. The Roemer itself has served as the city hall since 1405, with the Kaisersaal upstairs hung with portraits of the emperors crowned just down the road.

2. 02

   Kaiserdom St Bartholomaeus - the imperial election church

   history

   Never a bishop's seat, but the church where the Holy Roman Emperors were elected from 1356 and crowned from 1562. The red sandstone tower is climbable and gives the closest thing to a medieval view of the city. The election chapel off the choir is the small room where the seven prince-electors voted.

3. 03

   Staedel Museum - seven centuries of European painting

   culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   The finest art museum in the country outside Berlin and Munich, running from Cranach, Vermeer and Rembrandt through Tischbein's famous portrait of Goethe sprawled in the Roman campagna to a strong modern wing buried under the garden. Small enough to do properly in an afternoon.

4. 04

   Museumsufer - the museum embankment along the Main

   culture arts scenic 👍 Popular

   A dozen museums lined up along the south bank in a row of old villas: film, architecture, applied arts, world cultures, ancient sculpture at the Liebieghaus and communications. Few cities have anything like this density on one riverside walk, and the promenade linking them is the nicest stretch of the city.

5. 05

   Main Tower - the city's only public skyscraper deck

   scenic 👍 Popular

   Fifty-odd floors up a bank tower, with an open-air platform that is the one place you can stand inside the skyline and look down on it; the rest of the towers are private offices. Go near sunset, when the glass turns and the Taunus hills show up on the western horizon.

6. 06

   Sachsenhausen apple-wine taverns - Ebbelwoi from a Bembel

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   Frankfurt's own drink is a tart, flat cider served from a blue-grey stoneware jug into a ribbed glass, in wood-panelled taverns that seat strangers on the same bench. It comes with Handkaes mit Musik, a sour cheese under raw onion, and Frankfurter Gruene Sosse, a cold herb sauce over eggs and potatoes.

7. 07

   Goethe-Haus - the poet's birthplace on the Grosser Hirschgraben

   history culture arts

   Goethe was born here in 1749 and wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther upstairs. The house was flattened in the war and rebuilt to the original plans around the family's own furniture, which had been carried out beforehand. The attached museum hangs the Romantic painting he grew up among.

8. 08

   Kleinmarkthalle - the covered market and its wine balcony

   food

   Two floors of butchers, cheesemongers, bakers and Italian and Turkish stalls in the middle of the old town, where the city actually shops. The green-sauce herb bunches are sold ready-tied. On Saturdays the upstairs balcony turns into a standing wine bar and the whole hall gets loud.

9. 09

   Paulskirche - where the first German parliament sat

   history

   A plain oval church that housed the freely elected National Assembly of 1848, which drafted a constitution, offered the crown to a Prussian king who refused it, and was eventually broken up by troops. Rebuilt after the war as a bare civic hall rather than a church, which suits the story.

10. 10

    Palmengarten - Victorian glasshouses in the Westend

    nature wildlife scenic

    A large botanical garden laid out in the 1870s, with a grand iron palm house, a chain of climate houses running from desert to cloud forest, and lawns that fill on the first warm weekend of the year. The Westend's banker villas start at the gates.

11. 11

    Senckenberg Museum - dinosaurs and the Messel fossils

    nature wildlife culture arts

    One of Europe's biggest natural history collections, with a hall of mounted dinosaur skeletons and the fossils from the Messel Pit, an oil-shale quarry outside the city that preserved Eocene animals down to their fur and their last meal. Reliably the best rainy afternoon in Frankfurt with children.

12. 12

    Zeil - Germany's busiest shopping street

    shopping

    A pedestrianised run of department stores and chains between Hauptwache and Konstablerwache, backed by the glass funnel of the MyZeil centre. The serious shopping is a block south on Goethestrasse, which is the luxury strip, and the farmers' market at Konstablerwache is worth timing a visit around.

Getting to & around Frankfurt

Know before you go