Germany · Franconia
Nuremberg
The Holy Roman Empire's unofficial capital, which the Nazis took for their stage set and the world then used as its courtroom.
Nuremberg is Franconia's big city, a walled medieval one rebuilt after the war, with the Kaiserburg on its sandstone crag above a lattice of half-timbered lanes. It was the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire and Duerer's home town, which is exactly why the Nazis staged their rallies here and why the Allies chose it for the trials that followed. Both layers are still on the ground, and the city explains them without flinching.
Suggested stay
2–3 days
Language
German
Currency
EUR
Timezone
UTC+2
Why you'll love Nuremberg
The walls Nearly the whole medieval ring still stands, four kilometres of sandstone with towers and a dry moat, and the imperial castle holds the rock at the high end.
History faced head-on The rally grounds and Courtroom 600 are both open, both explained carefully, and the city treats its worst chapter as something to teach rather than tidy away.
Food Finger-sized bratwurst grilled over beechwood, Lebkuchen baked here since the Middle Ages and dark Franconian Rotbier - a regional kitchen with its own protected names and no interest in Bavarian ones.
Duerer's town The painter's timbered house stands under the castle, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum holds the largest collection of German art and culture anywhere, from Bronze Age gold to the first globe.
Best time to visit
Apr-Oct
14-25° days
49.454° N, 11.077° E
UTC+2 · Europe/Berlin
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Weather & when to go to Nuremberg
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Apr-Oct
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Nuremberg
January and February are cold, grey and short on daylight, and the old town looks bare with little to soften it. December is cold too, and it is when the Christkindlesmarkt fills the Hauptmarkt - one of the oldest and most crowded Christmas markets in Germany, so expect full hotels and shoulder-to-shoulder squares. Summer weekends around the castle get busy, but the city absorbs crowds better than smaller Franconian towns.
Top things to do in Nuremberg
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Kaiserburg - the imperial castle on the rock
history scenic 👍 PopularEvery Holy Roman emperor from the eleventh century on held court up here, and the complex is really three castles grown together. The round Sinwellturm gives the view over the red roofs, the Deep Well is demonstrated by lowering a light down a shaft cut through solid sandstone, and the Romanesque double chapel stacks the emperor above his retinue.
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Nazi Party Rally Grounds - the Documentation Centre and Zeppelinfeld
history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedSoutheast of the centre, on a lake, sits the half-finished Congress Hall the party never completed, now cut open by a glass spike holding the documentation centre's exhibition on how the rallies were staged and what they were for. Outside, the Zeppelin grandstand and the granite parade road are left deliberately unrestored. Allow a long half day.
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Memorium Nuremberg Trials - Courtroom 600
history ⭐ Highly recommendedThe Palace of Justice survived the bombing and had a prison attached, which is a large part of why the trials happened here. Courtroom 600 is still a working court, so access depends on the day's list, and the exhibition upstairs covers the defendants, the evidence and the legal argument that made the whole thing possible.
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Hauptmarkt - the Schoener Brunnen and the Frauenkirche clock
history culture arts 👍 PopularThe main square sits on the site of the Jewish quarter cleared in 1349, and carries a gilded fourteenth-century fountain shaped like a church spire, with a brass ring in the railing everyone turns for luck. On the Frauenkirche opposite, a clockwork of 1509 sends the seven electors circling Charles IV once a day at noon.
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Albrecht Duerer's House - the artist's workshop
culture arts historyA tall timbered house against the castle wall, where Duerer lived for the last twenty years of his life. The reconstructed workshop demonstrates the printing press and the pigments that made him rich across Europe, and the rooms are furnished as a wealthy craftsman's household rather than a shrine. Small and worth an hour.
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Germanisches Nationalmuseum - German culture in one building
culture arts historyThe biggest museum of German cultural history anywhere, taking a whole block behind Dani Karavan's Way of Human Rights, a colonnade of pillars carved with the Universal Declaration in dozens of languages. Inside: Behaim's globe of 1492, made before anyone here knew about the Americas, Duerer paintings, Bronze Age gold hats and armour by the room.
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St. Lorenz and St. Sebald - the two great churches
history culture artsThe old town has one parish church on each bank and both kept their treasures through the war. St. Lorenz hangs Veit Stoss's Angelic Salutation above the choir and stands Adam Kraft's tabernacle, a spire of carved stone, beside it. St. Sebald holds its saint in a bronze shrine Peter Vischer and his sons spent years casting.
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Weissgerbergasse and the Henkersteg - the surviving lanes
history scenicThe tanners' street is the one full row of half-timbered houses the raids missed, each crooked and painted a different colour. From its end the Pegnitz is crossed by a covered wooden footbridge to the hangman's tower, with the old wine store leaning over the water beside it. The best twenty minutes in the city.
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Felsengaenge and the art bunker - the rock beneath the castle
history off beaten pathThe sandstone under the old town is honeycombed with hand-cut cellars, dug for brewing and later used as air raid shelters. One tour goes down into the beer galleries from a brewpub on the hill; another visits the sealed bunker where the city hid Duerer's works, the Veit Stoss carvings and the imperial regalia through the war.
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Christkindlesmarkt - the Advent market on the Hauptmarkt
culture arts shopping 👍 PopularGermany's best-known Christmas market runs through Advent on the main square, opened by a girl in gold and white speaking from the Frauenkirche gallery. The stalls are held to a traditional look, so the goods are Lebkuchen, blown glass, tin and the little prune-and-fig figures the city invented. It is very crowded and worth it once.
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Toy Museum and the DB Museum - the city for children
culture arts historyNuremberg made toys for centuries and still hosts the trade's world fair, and the toy museum runs from wooden dolls through tin trains to postwar plastic. Ten minutes away, Germany's oldest railway museum keeps a working replica of the Adler, the locomotive that pulled the country's first train out of this city.
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Franconian eating - bratwurst, Schaeufele and Rotbier
foodThe local sausages are deliberately small, grilled over beech and sold three in a roll from hatches by the churches, or by the dozen on pewter with kraut. Alongside them: Schaeufele, a roast pork shoulder with crackling and dumpling, sour Nuremberg pot roast, and dark malty Rotbier from the brewpubs, which is a Franconian style rather than a Bavarian one.
Best areas to stay in Nuremberg
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Sebalder Altstadt
First-time visitors $$$Half-timbered lanes under the castle
Explore hotels in Sebalder Altstadt →
Lorenzer Altstadt
Easy arrivals $$Busy shopping half inside the walls
Explore hotels in Lorenzer Altstadt →
Gostenhof
Nightlife and value $Scruffy, creative and multicultural
Explore hotels in Gostenhof →
St. Johannis
Quiet and local $$Leafy villas and walled gardens
Explore hotels in St. Johannis →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Nuremberg
Getting to & around Nuremberg
Getting there
Fly into Nuremberg Airport, then about twelve minutes on the U2 underground straight to the main station at the edge of the old town.
Flight
Nuremberg Airport (NUE)
Around 7 km north of the centre. The U2 line runs from beneath the terminal to Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof in roughly twelve minutes, with trains every few minutes; a taxi takes about twenty. The old town begins directly across the road from the station, through the round tower and the Koenigstor gate.
Train
Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof
A major ICE junction: about an hour from Munich, two from Frankfurt, three from Berlin on the high-speed line through Erfurt, with regional services all over Franconia.
Coach
Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof
Long-distance buses use the coach station beside the main station, on routes across Germany and east towards Prague.
Drive
Three autobahns meet here, so it is an easy drive from most of Germany. The old town is largely pedestrianised; use the ring-road garages just outside the wall.
Getting around
Walking
The walled old town is about a kilometre across and nearly everything sits inside it, though the castle end is a real climb.
Free
U-Bahn
Three lines under the centre, two of them driverless. Fast for the rally grounds, the airport and the Palace of Justice.
TBC
Tram
Rings the old town and runs out to Gostenhof and the western suburbs. Useful when you do not want another set of steps.
TBC
S-Bahn and regional trains
From the Hauptbahnhof out to Fuerth, Erlangen and the Franconian towns, and the way most day trips start.
TBC
Cycling
Flat along the Pegnitz and well provided with lanes, though the cobbles and the castle hill are hard work.
TBC
Day trips from Nuremberg
Bamberg
Full dayUNESCO old town
A hill town that came through the war untouched, with a UNESCO old centre, a four-towered cathedral holding the Bamberg Horseman and an emperor's tomb, and a half-timbered town hall built on an island in mid-river. Its breweries make smoked beer, malted over beechwood, which tastes like nothing else in Germany.
Getting there
train
40-50 min by train
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Full dayWalled medieval town
The most complete walled town in Germany and the set piece of the Romantic Road: a full circuit of covered ramparts you can walk, gate towers, and a lopsided little square that appears on half the country's Christmas cards. Very touristed by day and quite different once the coaches leave.
Getting there
train
About 1 hr 15 by train, changing at Steinach
Regensburg
Full dayDanube cathedral city
A Roman legionary fortress that became a medieval trading city and kept both, so a Roman gate stands a few streets from a twelfth-century stone bridge and a Gothic cathedral. The old town survived intact, the patrician tower houses are Italian in feel, and there is a sausage kitchen by the bridge that has been going for centuries.
Getting there
train
About 1 hr by train
Wuerzburg
Full dayBaroque residence and wine
The prince-bishops' palace here carries the largest ceiling fresco in the world, painted by Tiepolo over the staircase, and is a UNESCO site. Above the Main sits the older fortress, and the vineyard slopes around the city produce dry Franconian wine, bottled in the flat green flask you see nowhere else.
Getting there
train
About 1 hr by train
Franconian Switzerland
Full dayLimestone crags and caves
A small upland of limestone towers, dripstone caves and castle ruins between Nuremberg and Bamberg, with more breweries per head than anywhere on earth and a beer garden in most villages. Climbers come for the crags, walkers for the valley paths, and the whole area turns white with cherry blossom in spring.
Getting there
train | bus | car
About 1 hr by train to Forchheim or Ebermannstadt, then bus; easier by car
A little history of Nuremberg
Nuremberg first appears in a document of 1050, as a rock with a castle on it. Its position at the crossing of central European trade routes made it one of the great cities of the Holy Roman Empire, a free imperial city answering to nobody but the emperor, where the Golden Bull of 1356 obliged every newly elected king to hold his first Diet, and where the imperial regalia were kept for centuries. By 1500 its metalworkers, printers, instrument makers and painters had made it the workshop of Germany, and Albrecht Duerer, Veit Stoss and Martin Behaim all worked within a few streets of each other.
Shifting trade routes and the Thirty Years' War ended that, and in 1806 the city lost its independence to Bavaria, an annexation Franconians have never quite let go of. Industry and the country's first railway revived it. The Nazis then seized on its imperial past for their annual rallies, began a megalomaniac complex in the southeast they never finished, and attached its name to the race laws of 1935. An air raid in January 1945 flattened almost the whole walled town; the Allies held the war crimes trials here months later, and the city rebuilt on its medieval street plan.
The castle rock is named for the first time in a document of Emperor Henry III.
The Golden Bull requires every newly elected king to hold his first Diet in Nuremberg.
Albrecht Duerer is born here, at the height of the city's craft and printing trades.
The council adopts the Reformation, making Nuremberg a leading Protestant city.
Imperial freedom ends and the city is absorbed into the Kingdom of Bavaria.
Germany's first steam railway runs the short line from Nuremberg to neighbouring Fuerth.
The race laws stripping German Jews of citizenship are announced at the party rally.
A January air raid destroys most of the old town; the war crimes trials open in November.
A documentation centre opens inside the unfinished Congress Hall on the rally grounds.
Know before you go
Payment
Cards & cash mixed
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type C / F
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+49
The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
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FAQs about Nuremberg
▸ When is the best time to visit Nuremberg?
April to October, with May, June and September the pick: long evenings, beer gardens open and the castle terrace at its best. December is cold and dark, and it is also Christkindlesmarkt season, which is the one strong reason to come in winter. January and February are the months to skip.
▸ How many days do you need in Nuremberg?
Two. One covers the walled old town, the castle and the churches at a fair pace; the second is really for the rally grounds and Courtroom 600, which sit in opposite directions and both deserve unhurried time. A third day buys you Bamberg or the Germanisches Nationalmuseum properly.
▸ Is the old town genuinely medieval or rebuilt?
Rebuilt, mostly. The January 1945 raid destroyed the great majority of it. The city chose to reconstruct on the medieval street plan rather than start again, so the shape and scale are real, the churches and castle were repaired from their own stone, and a few blocks such as Weissgerbergasse survived outright.
▸ Is Nuremberg in Bavaria?
Administratively yes, culturally not really. This is Franconia, absorbed by Bavaria in 1806, with its own dialect, its own dry wine and dark beer, and its own view of Munich. Order a Bavarian sausage here and you will be corrected politely but firmly.
▸ Can you visit the Nazi rally grounds independently?
Yes. The site is a public park southeast of the centre, reached by tram or S-Bahn, and you can walk the grandstand and the parade road freely. The documentation centre inside the unfinished Congress Hall provides the exhibition and audio guide that make sense of what you are standing on.
▸ Is Nuremberg good with children?
Unusually so. It was Europe's toy-making capital for centuries and still has the toy museum, plus Germany's oldest railway museum, a large landscaped zoo in the forest east of town, tunnels under the castle to walk through, and the Playmobil park out at Zirndorf a short train ride away.
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