Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Museums
Nebra (Unstrut)
The Nebra Sky Disc visitor center (Arche Nebra) in Saxony-Anhalt is the best place to understand one of the most important archaeological finds in the world, a Bronze Age bronze disc inlaid with gold astronomical symbols. A striking golden…
Museums
Ingolstadt
The Audi museum mobile in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, tells the story of the four-ring brand inside a striking round glass building at the Audi Forum, next to the company's headquarters and main plant. About 100 cars, motorcycles and bicycles tra…
Museums
Augsburg
For generations of German children, TV time began with a box lid slowly opening. Behind it, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, the Urmel or Kater Mikesch danced on strings. The Augsburger Puppenkiste has performed since 1948 in the his…
Museums
Zwickau
Drive an Audi and you are driving a piece of Zwickau's history. This is where August Horch founded his first car company in 1904, and when he fell out with the supervisory board and was no longer allowed to use his own name, he simply call…
Museums
Wolfsburg
The Autostadt in Wolfsburg is Volkswagen's combined theme park, car museum and new-car delivery center, set in a 69-acre (28 ha) landscaped park on the Mittelland Canal right next to the company's main factory. You can explore brand pavili…
Museums
Weimar
The Bauhaus Museum Weimar tells the story of the 20th century's most influential design school in the very city where it was founded in 1919. Housed in a stark concrete cube that opened for the Bauhaus centenary, it holds the oldest Bauhau…
Museums
Bonn
The Beethoven House in Bonn (Beethoven-Haus) is the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven and home to the world's largest Beethoven collection. In this modest pink townhouse on Bonngasse, the composer was born in December 1770. Today its crea…
Museums
Berlin
The Bode Museum (Bode-Museum) sits at the northern tip of Berlin's Museum Island, a striking neo-Baroque building with a green dome rising above the River Spree. It holds the Sculpture Collection, the Museum of Byzantine Art, and the Coin…
Museums
Hamburg
The Cap San Diego in Hamburg is the largest operational museum cargo ship in the world, and it is moored at the Überseebrücke in the middle of the harbor. The white ship with a red hull once carried cargo and a few passengers between Hambu…
Museums
Bremerhaven
The German Emigration Center (Deutsches Auswandererhaus) in Bremerhaven is an immersive museum about emigration and immigration, built on the very harbor where millions of Europeans boarded ships for America. You walk through a recreated q…
Museums
Bochum
The German Mining Museum (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum) in Bochum is one of the largest mining museums in the world and one of the essential things to do in the Ruhr region. Beneath its towering green headframe, it tells the story of coal, ore…
Museums
Dortmund
Step out of Dortmund's main station and you are practically at the door: the German Football Museum is the German Football Association's national museum and tells the story from Bern 1954 to Rio 2014 on two exhibition floors. Here you find…
Museums
Hamburg
The German Port Museum (Deutsches Hafenmuseum) in Hamburg is an open-air museum on the working waterfront of one of Europe's biggest ports. Set on the quay of the Hansahafen in the Kleiner Grasbrook district, it combines a protected brick…
Museums
Dresden
The German Hygiene Museum (Deutsches Hygiene-Museum) in Dresden is one of Germany's most unusual museums: not a medical collection but a museum about the human being, covering the body, health, emotions and society. Its white 1930 building…
Museums
Berlin
The German Museum of Technology (Deutsches Technikmuseum) in Berlin's Kreuzberg district is one of the largest technology museums in Germany and among the most popular things to do in Berlin, with more than 700,000 visitors in 2023. Set on…
Museums
Berchtesgaden
The Obersalzberg Documentation Centre is a place of learning and remembrance at a perpetrators' site: here above Berchtesgaden, from the 1930s, lay the restricted "Führer zone" with Hitler's Berghof and the houses of other Nazi leaders. Th…
Museums
Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler
In an emergency, the West German chancellor, the federal president and around 3,000 people would have sat out a nuclear war here for 30 days behind sealed steel gates. The Government Bunker in the Ahr valley was one of the best-kept secret…
Museums
Dortmund
Arrive in Dortmund by train and you see it straight away: a dark brick tower topped by a giant glowing golden U, with huge moving video images below it. The Dortmunder U was once the fermenting and storage building of the Union brewery; to…
Museums
Lübeck
The European Hansemuseum in Lübeck is considered the world's largest museum devoted to the Hanseatic League, the medieval trading network that once dominated northern Europe. Set at the northern tip of Lübeck's UNESCO-listed old town, it t…
Museums
Bad Windsheim
The Franconian Open-Air Museum in Bad Windsheim (Fränkisches Freilandmuseum) is the largest open-air museum in Bavaria and shows how people in Franconia once lived and worked. Across 45 hectares, more than 120 historic buildings from all o…
Museums
Neu-Anspach
Hessenpark in Neu-Anspach is the open-air museum of the German state of Hesse and one of the top family day trips from Frankfurt. Spread across about 65 hectares (160 acres) in the Taunus hills, it brings together more than a hundred histo…
Museums
Kassel
The Fridericianum in Kassel is one of the first public museums in continental Europe and the historic home of documenta, the world-famous exhibition of contemporary art. Behind its columned Neoclassical facade on Friedrichsplatz, the build…
Museums
Nürnberg
The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg is the largest museum of cultural history in the German-speaking world and one of the top things to do in Nuremberg. Spread across a medieval Carthusian monastery and striking modern wings, it t…
Museums
Frauenau
The Frauenau Glass Museum in the Bavarian Forest tells the story of glass from its beginnings in Mesopotamia to the art of today. Frauenau looks back on some 500 years of glassmaking and became a European centre of the studio glass movemen…