Nuremberg

The medieval jail cut into the cellars under the Old Town Hall in the fourteenth century, one of the largest to survive: twelve cramped wood-lined cells and a torture chamber where the accused were held to await trial or execution. You go down only with a guide, into low panelled rooms that make late-medieval justice horribly concrete. Claustrophobic, and unforgettable.

Best shot Straight down into a wood-panelled cell, low light.

The sandstone Imperial Castle on the ridge over the old town, a seat of the Holy Roman Emperors from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, its dark silhouette all round towers, a Romanesque double chapel and a deep well cut into the rock. Climb up for the castle and the view down over the red roofs.

Best shot The Palas, chapel and Sinwell Tower at blue hour.

• Touristy

One of the most atmospheric graveyards in Europe, opened in the early sixteenth century when the dead were banned from inside the walls, a strict grid of flat, sarcophagus-like ledger stones, many once set with engraved bronze plaques. Dürer, the sculptor Veit Stoss and the poet Hans Sachs all lie here among some six thousand graves. Go on a grey day.

Best shot The rows of flat ledger stones running toward the church tower.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The oldest parish church in Nuremberg, begun around 1215, twin-towered Gothic, wrecked in 1945 and rebuilt. At its heart is the bronze Shrine of St Sebald, cast by the Vischers over eleven years, a fantastical canopy crawling with snails, dolphins, foliage and figures around the saint’s relics. Dark metal, and strange.

Best shot The dark bronze Vischer shrine inside, or the twin towers from the north.

The covered wooden Hangman’s Bridge and the tower-house where the city’s executioners were forced to live apart, their trade making them unclean in the eyes of the town. The five-hundred-year-old building over the Pegnitz now holds a small museum on medieval criminal law and the outcast life of the headsman, including the famous executioner-diarist Franz Schmidt. Grim, and fascinating.

Best shot The covered timber bridge and tower reflected in the Pegnitz.

• Solo-friendly

Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice, where the International Military Tribunal tried the surviving Nazi leadership in 1945 and 1946 and modern international law was born. Since 2020 the original courtroom is part of the permanent exhibition on the trials and their legacy. A sober place of justice and reckoning, not spectacle. Check ahead, as the courtroom occasionally closes for use.

• Quiet

In the surviving wing of the Nazis’ unfinished Congress Hall, a glass-and-steel spike driven through the monumental brick, a documentation centre on how the party rallies were staged here and what they led to. A place of education and remembrance, with a new permanent exhibition opened in 2026. Go to understand, never to gawp.

• Quiet

One of the few lanes to come through 1945 largely intact, the tanners’ street, a crooked row of steep timber-framed medieval houses, leaning gables and shadowed doorways. After dark, under the lanterns, it is the most atmospheric old street in the city. Free, and best on a wet night.

Best shot Up the lane at the leaning half-timbered fronts, blue hour or wet cobbles.

• Solo-friendly

A small family hotel in a half-timbered house first recorded as an inn in 1342, tucked into the castle district by St. Sebald, its rooms built around exposed seven-hundred-year-old oak beams and medieval framing, with modern comfort slotted in between. Sleep inside the fourteenth century.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A boutique theme hotel in the old centre, named for the three ravens said to have sat on its chimney for centuries, its rooms built around Nuremberg’s legends and figures, Dürer, the clockmaker Henlein and the rest. Story-driven, a little theatrical, with a wine tasting at the bar.

• Adults only

A privately run hotel built in 1896 in Nuremberg’s Gothic Revival style, now a listed building, standing by the Königstor gate into the old town, its ornate historic front hiding individually designed rooms. Period architecture, modern within.

• Adults only

A family hotel in a heritage-listed landmark of 1889, a turreted tower house in the ornate old Nuremberg style built over a 1522 predecessor, protected by law and full of period detail behind a striking front. Central and characterful.

• Adults only

A brewpub on the oldest brewing site in the old town, reviving the city’s copper-red Rotbier, and beneath it the Historische Felsengänge, cellars hacked from the sandstone in the Middle Ages to age the beer, now open for guided tours, including candlelit dark walks through the rock passages. Drink the beer, then go under the city.

Best shot The candlelit rock-cut passages of the Felsengänge.

• Adults only

A bratwurst kitchen that says it is the oldest in the world, records at the address going back to 1419, the little Nuremberg sausages grilled over an open beechwood fire at the old hearth, in a low candlelit room walled in six-hundred-year-old sandstone. Small, ancient, delicious.

• Adults only

One of the oldest taverns in the city, grilling the original Nuremberg bratwurst over beechwood since 1312, a cosy half-timbered house in the shadow of St. Sebald, the sausages made in its own butchery. Touristy, and worth it.

• Adults only
• Touristy

A Franconian brewery restaurant in the medieval vaulted cellar of the Mauthalle, a former civic granary of 1500, mighty sandstone pillars and arches making one of the largest historic cellars in Germany. Beer and Schäufele under the vaults.

Best shot The sandstone pillars and arches of the great cellar.

• Adults only

One of the biggest goth and darkwear shops in Germany, trading since 1998, three hundred square metres of gothic and latex clothing, some fifteen hundred pairs of heels and boots, and a wall of esoteric and ritual supplies. The full black wardrobe, under one roof.

• Solo-friendly

A retro and alternative boutique in the old town, fifties and sixties vintage upstairs and, in the basement, Vampiria DarkWear: gothic, corsetry, steampunk and club wear. Two eras of black under one address.

• Solo-friendly

An antiques dealer in Gostenhof with a proper cabinet-of-curiosities streak: furniture, glass and porcelain, jewellery, old books and a rotating shelf of the rare and the odd, carved skulls and stranger things among it. Go to hunt.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A traditional antiquarian bookshop in the western old town, strong on old prints, bibliophile editions and regional and travel literature, the owner building collections to order. Open a few days a week, so time it.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet