Things to see and do in Germany

Ludwig II of Bavaria had this castle raised on a crag above Hohenschwangau from 1869 and never saw it finished, dying in 1886 with barely a third of the rooms complete. The first drawings came from a theatre designer rather than an architect, which is why the throne hall and the singers' hall read as stage sets built in stone. Below the walls the ground falls away to the Alpsee and the foothills, and the Marienbrücke footbridge over the Pöllat gorge frames the view that fills the postcards. Only the outside can be wandered freely.

Architect: Christian Jank · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage since 2025

Location: Schwangau, Bavaria

Access: Ticketed, and the interior only on a timed guided tour

Building began in 1248, stalled for three centuries with a crane left standing on the unfinished south tower, and only ended in 1880 when nineteenth century masons went back to the medieval plans. At 157 metres its twin spires are the tallest of any church in the world, and around six million visitors a year make it the most visited landmark in the country. The golden Shrine of the Three Kings stands behind the high altar, and the glass runs from medieval panels to Gerhard Richter's field of coloured squares of 2007. A stair of 533 steps climbs the south tower.

Style: Gothic · Built: 1248 to 1880 · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage since 1996

Location: Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia

Access: Ticketed for tourist visits, with the north transept kept free for prayer

No other structure carries as much German history in one silhouette. Carl Gotthard Langhans modelled the sandstone gateway on the entrance to the Athenian Acropolis and completed it in 1791, and Napoleon carted the Quadriga off to Paris before it came back eight years later. From 1961 the monument stood inside the border strip, out of reach from both sides of the divided city, and the crowds who gathered at it in November 1989 turned it into the image of a reunited country. It marks the western end of Unter den Linden.

Architect: Carl Gotthard Langhans · Completed: 1791

Location: Pariser Platz, Berlin

Access: Free, an open square with no ticket and no closing time

The German parliament sits in a building that keeps its own damage on show. Paul Wallot finished it in 1894, fire gutted the chamber in 1933, and Red Army soldiers wrote their names on the walls in 1945; those inscriptions were deliberately left in place when Norman Foster rebuilt the interior for the returning Bundestag. His glass dome stands over the debating chamber with a ramp spiralling up its inner wall, so the public walks above the politicians and looks out at the government quarter and the Tiergarten.

Architect: Paul Wallot, rebuilt by Norman Foster · Completed: 1894

Location: Platz der Republik, Berlin

Access: Free, with advance registration required for the dome and the roof terrace

The longest piece of the Berlin Wall still standing runs about 1.3 kilometres beside the Spree in Friedrichshain. In 1990, months after the border opened, artists from more than twenty countries painted the eastern face that had always been kept blank, and a border installation became an open air gallery of over a hundred works. Two of them end up on most postcards: the Brezhnev and Honecker kiss by Dmitri Vrubel, and a Trabant bursting through the concrete. Most of what stands there today is a repainting of the 1990 originals made in 2009.

Painted: 1990 · Length: about 1.3 kilometres

Location: Mühlenstraße, Friedrichshain, Berlin

Access: Free, a riverside path open at any hour

Five museums raised between 1824 and 1930 fill the northern tip of the island in the Spree, an ensemble UNESCO listed in 1999 as a record of how the public museum was invented. The Neues Museum holds the Egyptian collection and the bust of Nefertiti, the Alte Nationalgalerie hangs nineteenth century painting behind a temple front, and the Bode Museum closes the point with sculpture and a vast coin cabinet. The Pergamonmuseum is shut for a long refurbishment, so a visit is built around the other houses.

Built: 1824 to 1930 · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage since 1999

Location: Spreeinsel, Mitte, Berlin

Tickets and tours

Access: Ticketed, museum by museum or on a combined pass

Munich has been arranged around this square since the city was founded on the salt road in 1158 and the market moved here. The neo-Gothic New Town Hall fills the north side, and the Glockenspiel in its tower acts out a ducal wedding of 1568 and the coopers' dance daily at eleven and at noon, with an extra turn at five from March to October. The Old Town Hall closes the eastern end, the Mariensäule stands in the middle of it, and the stalls of Viktualienmarkt are two minutes away.

Laid out: 1158 · Glockenspiel: daily at 11:00 and 12:00

Location: Altstadt, Munich

Access: Free, a public square with no ticket at any hour

Frederick the Great wanted a single storey summer house above six curving vine terraces, and called it Sanssouci, without a care. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff built it between 1745 and 1747 from the king's own sketches, which is why the rooms are small, the ceilings low and the rococo decoration runs to gilded spiders and vine tendrils. Voltaire stayed here, and Frederick was buried on the terrace beside his dogs in 1991. The palace anchors a park of some 500 hectares that UNESCO listed with the Berlin palaces in 1990.

Architect: Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff · Built: 1745 to 1747

Location: Sanssouci Park, Potsdam

Access: Timed entry, with fixed admission slots and a daily limit on tickets

The red sandstone pile on the Königstuhl slope has stood half ruined since French troops blew up parts of it in 1689 and 1693, and lightning finished the work in 1764. Romantic painters and poets then made the wreck famous across Europe, and nobody put it back together. What survives repays the climb: the statue-lined front of the Ottheinrich wing, a terrace over the Neckar and the old town, the German Pharmacy Museum and the Great Tun, a wine barrel holding some 220,000 litres in the cellar.

Style: Gothic and Renaissance · Ruined: 1689, 1693 and 1764

Location: Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg

Access: Ticketed, with the funicular, courtyard, Great Tun and Pharmacy Museum on one ticket

Sixty five kilometres of river between Rüdesheim and Koblenz run through a gorge lined with hilltop castles, terraced vineyards and small wine towns, and UNESCO listed the stretch in 2002 as a landscape shaped by that mix. Burg Katz looks down on Sankt Goarshausen, the Pfalzgrafenstein toll castle sits on its own island at Kaub, and the Lorelei rock narrows the channel where the current still concerns the pilots. Trains run along both banks, ferries cross where there is no bridge, and boats work between the villages from spring to autumn.

Length: 65 kilometres, Rüdesheim to Koblenz · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage since 2002

Location: Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse

Access: Free to travel through, with the individual castles ticketed

Germany runs out of altitude at 2,962 metres, where the Austrian border crosses the summit and the old checkpoint has stood unstaffed since both countries joined the Schengen area. Josef Naus made the first ascent in 1820, a cross has marked the top since 1851, and the two largest glaciers in the country lie on the flanks below. Reaching it takes no rope now: a rack railway tunnels through the northern flank to the Zugspitzplatt, cable cars climb from the Eibsee and from the Tyrolean side, and the two German lines carry some 500,000 people a year between them.

Elevation: 2,962 metres, the highest in Germany · Range: Wetterstein Mountains

Location: South of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria

Access: Ticketed for the rack railway and the cable cars

George Bähr, city architect of Dresden, worked on this Lutheran church from 1726 to 1743 and died before it was finished, having set altar, pulpit and font together in the middle so the whole congregation could see them. The firebombing of February 1945 brought the dome down, and the heap of blackened stone was left for decades as a memorial, a counterpart to the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. Residents had numbered the salvaged fragments, so when rebuilding began in 1994 those stones went back into the walls, which is why the elevation is mottled dark and pale.

Style: Baroque, by George Bähr · Rebuilt: 1994 to 2005

Location: Neumarkt, Dresden, Saxony

Access: Ticketed for the dome ascent and the guided tours, with set hours for visits to the nave

The walls are the reason to come. Rothenburg keeps a complete circuit of them, one of only four German towns that still can, and the covered walkway on top runs above the gardens. The town grew from 1170 around its market square and the church of St James, and governed itself as a free imperial city until 1803. The medieval look owes as much to repair as to luck: bombs on 31 March 1945 destroyed about a third of the houses, though most outer walls stayed up and were built back into them. The Plönlein, a fork of lanes under two towers, is the corner everyone photographs.

Founded: 1170 · Walls: one of four German towns with a complete circuit

Location: Middle Franconia, Bavaria, on the Romantic Road

Access: Free to walk, with museums and tower climbs ticketed

A wooded range about 160 kilometres long and up to 50 wide fills the southwest corner of the country, spruce and cleared pasture above steep valleys between the Rhine and the Neckar. Both the Danube and the Neckar rise in it. The Feldberg is the high point, glacial lakes such as the Titisee and the Feldsee sit in hollows below it, and above Triberg the Gutach drops 163 metres in seven steps, one of the highest falls in Germany. Cuckoo clocks, cured ham, Kirschwasser and the cherry gateau all come from these valleys.

Area: about 6,009 square kilometres · Highest point: the Feldberg, 1,493 metres

Location: Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany

Access: Free to walk and drive through, with lifts and museums ticketed

Hamburg put a concert hall on the roof of a harbour warehouse. Herzog and de Meuron kept the brick hulk of the Kaispeicher, a store built in the 1960s on the Grasbrook peninsula, and raised a glass body over it with about a thousand curved panes and a roofline like a wave, 108 metres at its western end and the tallest inhabited building in the city. A curved escalator 82 metres long climbs through the old brick to the Plaza, a public deck at 37 metres where visitors can walk right around the building and look over the port. The grand hall above seats 2,100 in vineyard tiers around the players.

Architects: Herzog and de Meuron · Opened: 2017

Location: HafenCity, Hamburg

Access: Timed entry to the Plaza deck, with concert and tour tickets sold separately