Regensburg

Construction began around 1273 on the site of earlier Carolingian and Romanesque cathedrals, making this the only major pure Gothic cathedral in Bavaria. Work stalled for centuries after the nave was finished in the 1520s, and the iconic twin west towers were only added in 1859-1869 under King Ludwig I, who was determined to see the building finally completed. Inside, look for the 14th-century stained glass in the choir (some of the oldest in Bavaria) and the smiling 13th-century stone angel (the 'Regensburg Laughing Angel') on a nave pillar. The Regensburger Domspatzen ('cathedral sparrows'), one of the world's oldest boys' choirs, traces its roots to 975 and still sings the 10am Sunday Mass in term time.

Free admission (donations welcomed); the Domschatzmuseum (treasury) is a separate paid ticket

Built 1135-1146 as a single, continuous span across the Danube, the Stone Bridge was for nearly 800 years the only reliable river crossing in the region and a vital link on the medieval trade route between northern Europe, Venice and Rome. Its 310-meter, multi-arched design (some arches now sit over modern flood-control land rather than open water) was studied by the builders of Prague's Charles Bridge a century later. A small stone figure, the Bruckmandl, sits astride the central arch gazing toward the cathedral. The bridge and the fishing quarter of Stadtamhof across it are both part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for Regensburg's Old Town, inscribed in 2006.

Free — pedestrian bridge, open access

Regensburg's medieval city hall, expanded in stages from the 13th century, hosted the Immerwährender Reichstag — the 'Perpetual Imperial Diet' of the Holy Roman Empire — which met continuously here from 1663 until the Empire's dissolution in 1806, making it Europe's longest-running parliamentary assembly. The Reichssaal (Imperial Hall) survives with its original coffered ceiling and delegates' benches, and the guided tour also descends into the building's medieval interrogation and torture chambers, a sobering counterpoint to the diplomatic history upstairs. English-language tours run daily in season.

Adult €7.50, reduced €4, family €15 (guided tour only)

Built around 179 AD under Marcus Aurelius as the north gate of the Roman legionary camp Castra Regina, this is the only Roman gate still standing north of the Alps — its massive dressed stone blocks are now partly embedded in a later medieval building, visible from Unter den Schwibbögen. Castra Regina's Latin name is the direct root of 'Regensburg,' and the camp's rectangular street grid still shapes parts of today's Altstadt layout.

Free to view from the street

Built around 1260 by a wealthy trading family, this soaring tower house stood at the entrance to the medieval city, greeting merchants arriving over the Stone Bridge — one of dozens of such patrician towers Regensburg's trading families once built to display their wealth, many since lost. Its north facade carries a monumental 1573 fresco of David and Goliath by Melchior Bocksberger, restored several times since (a small graffiti frog in one corner was added by a 19th-century restorer). Locals have long read the giant-slaying image as a wink at Regensburg's own scrappy independence within the Holy Roman Empire. The building now houses a small theater.

Free to view the exterior

One of Regensburg's largest squares, framed by the Protestant Neupfarrkirche and lined with cafes and shops today — but built directly over the city's substantial medieval Jewish quarter, violently destroyed in a 1519 pogrom and expulsion. Excavations in the 1990s, ahead of a planned underground car park, instead turned up the foundations of the synagogue and Jewish houses, Roman-era remains beneath those, and a Nazi-era air-raid bunker, all now preserved in situ as 'document Neupfarrplatz.' Visits are by guided tour only (mostly in German, with a multimedia presentation), booked through the Tourist Info.

Square: free. document Neupfarrplatz guided tour: modest fee, check Tourist Info for current pricing

After fleeing westward at the end of WWII, Oskar and Emilie Schindler — later honored as 'Righteous Among the Nations' for saving more than 1,200 Jewish workers from the Holocaust through their factories — lived in a cramped shared apartment at Watmarkt 5, near the Goliathhaus, from November 1945 to September 1946 before emigrating. A red memorial plaque on the building's facade, added after the wide reach of Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' brought new attention to the couple's story, is easy to walk past unless you're looking for it.

Free — a street-level plaque

Tradition holds a Roman temple to Juno once stood on this site; the first Christian chapel here was built under Charlemagne, and the present collegiate foundation was established in 875 by Louis the German, making it Bavaria's oldest church institution. The Romanesque and Gothic structure underneath is now almost entirely hidden beneath a lavish 18th-century Rococo remodeling — one of Bavaria's finest — of white stucco, gold ornament and ceiling frescoes, a striking contrast to the plainer Dom just around the corner.

Free admission (donations welcomed)

When the Thurn und Taxis family — who built their fortune running the Holy Roman Empire's postal service — were compensated with the secularized St. Emmeram Abbey in 1812, they converted the sprawling monastic buildings into what is today reckoned Europe's largest inhabited private palace by floor area. Guided tours (several daily, German with an English audio guide available) move through opulent 19th-century state rooms — ballroom, staircase hall, private chapel — that sit directly against the abbey's medieval cloister walls, a genuinely unusual architectural layering. The Thurn und Taxis family still lives in part of the complex today.

Adult €6, reduced €4, children under 10 free with an adult

One of Bavaria's most important religious foundations, St. Emmeram's Abbey was established around 739 at the tomb of the Frankish missionary bishop Emmeram, martyred nearby in the late 7th century, and grew into one of the great monasteries of the early medieval Holy Roman Empire. The church itself preserves a Romanesque core beneath an exuberant 18th-century Baroque and Rococo remake by the Asam brothers, with richly frescoed ceilings and ornate altars — a striking, lesser-visited counterpart to the Dom, right next to the Thurn und Taxis palace it once adjoined as an abbey.

Free admission (donations welcomed)

Of the three defensive towers that once guarded the Stone Bridge's Old Town end, only this one survives, now housing a compact exhibition on the bridge's 12th-century construction technique and centuries of river life, alongside displays linked to the neighboring Danube Shipping Museum (Historisches Schifffahrtsmuseum). Climbing the tower gives a good elevated look back at the bridge, the Dom's spires and the Danube.

Modest admission; a combined ticket with the Danube Shipping Museum is available — exact current pricing not confirmed, check locally

Tucked into the vaulted medieval cellar of a listed townhouse just off the cathedral square, this private museum holds over 1,200 golf artifacts amassed across 50 years by collector and historian Peter Insam — among them a golf club dated to around 1450 and a golf ball from around 1525, both considered the oldest surviving examples in the world. It's a genuinely odd, easy-to-miss find in a city not otherwise associated with golf, and makes a good short change of pace between churches and ruins.

Adult €7.50, reduced €5, free for children up to 14

Housed in a former Minorite friary, this is the city's main history museum, walking through prehistoric finds, an unusually rich collection of Roman material from the Castra Regina legionary fortress, medieval trading-city artifacts, and a notable collection of paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer, the Danube School master who lived and worked in Regensburg in the early 16th century.

Adult €7.50, reduced €4, family €15

Reached through the Dom's Gothic cloister, this small treasury museum displays the cathedral chapter's liturgical art — bishops' vestments, gold and silver reliquaries, monstrances and processional crosses — spanning from the medieval period into the modern day. It's a quiet, focused stop that pairs naturally with a cathedral visit.

Modest admission; free for under-18s and school groups — exact adult pricing not confirmed, check locally

Part of the wider Thurn und Taxis museum complex at St. Emmeram, the Marstallmuseum fills the family's former royal stables (Marstall) with an extensive collection of gilded ceremonial carriages, sleighs and sedan chairs from the 17th to 20th centuries — a vivid, tangible sense of how a princely postal dynasty actually traveled and displayed its status.

Included with or combinable with the palace/treasury tour ticket — exact standalone pricing not confirmed, check locally

Johannes Kepler, the astronomer whose laws of planetary motion underpin modern astronomy, died in this house in November 1630 while in Regensburg to collect a debt from the Imperial Diet — a fittingly modest end for a life that had otherwise moved between royal courts. The building survived intact and was converted into a memorial museum in 1959–61, preserving period rooms furnished in 17th-century style alongside exhibits tracing Kepler's scientific breakthroughs and turbulent career. A 2024 renovation modernized the experience considerably, adding an audio/media guide and a developing "Science Lab" on the top floor where hands-on stations let visitors explore the astronomical concepts Kepler pioneered, plus barrier-free access via two separate entrances. It's a compact, specialist stop, best suited to visitors with an interest in the history of science.

Standard city-museum admission applies; no separate published rate found — check regensburg.de or on-site for the current ticket price

Opened in June 2019 after a roughly €95 million construction project right on the Danube's bank near the Stone Bridge, the Museum der Bayerischen Geschichte is one of the largest and newest history museums in Bavaria, and a striking piece of modern architecture in a city defined by its medieval skyline. Its permanent exhibition spans 2,500 square meters and around 1,000 objects, tracing Bavarian history from the founding of the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806 through both World Wars, division-era West Germany, and up to the present day — giving genuinely modern context to a city otherwise steeped in Roman and medieval history. Large glass facades throughout the building frame views over the Danube and Stone Bridge, making it as much a scenic riverside stop as a museum visit, and its central, ground-level location makes it an easy add to a walk along the promenade.

€7 adult; €5 reduced (65+); free for students under 30 and children/youth up to 18

Formed after a 1304 flood reshaped the Danube's course here, Oberer Wöhrd is the larger of Regensburg's two river islands — nearly 2km long, originally settled by fishing families and later planted with avenues of lime, oak and alder from 1654 for city officials to stroll. Today it's a quiet, leafy escape barely five minutes' walk from the cathedral, with riverside paths, a playground, a public pool (Wöhrdbad) and a couple of beer gardens looking back across the water at the old town's skyline.

Free

A 7.4-hectare English landscape garden just outside the old town's Helenentor gate, near the Thurn und Taxis palace, laid out by Carl von Effner — a royal Bavarian court gardener trained under the celebrated Peter Joseph Lenné. Around 30% of its roughly 1,400 trees, gnarled old chestnuts and beeches among them, date from the original 19th-century planting, and the winding paths are deliberately designed to keep revealing new views rather than a single vista.

Free

Stadtamhof was its own independent town until 1924, and its low riverside promenade — a short stroll from the Stone Bridge's north end — gives the single best panoramic view of Regensburg's old-town skyline: the Dom's twin spires, the bridge's arches and the tightly packed rooftops of the Altstadt, all reflected in the Danube. It's an easy, flat walk and one of the best free photo spots in the city, especially around sunset.

Free

Tucked against the Stone Bridge's south end, this cramped riverside kitchen traces its site back to a medieval workers' canteen that fed the bridge's 12th-century construction crews, and has fed locals and travelers ever since — it markets itself as the world's oldest continuously operating public restaurant. The kitchen still grills the same small, finger-length pork sausages over a beechwood fire, served with sweet mustard and sauerkraut, either at a handful of riverside tables or to go. Cash only, and expect a short queue at lunchtime.

Platters roughly €7.50-16.50; a plate of grilled sausages is the thing to order

Bishop Konrad IV founded the Katharinenspital hospice here in 1226, and its charter promised residents a nightly ration of beer — the roots of a brewing tradition documented from around 1350, making the Spitalbrauerei one of the last surviving medieval hospital breweries in Central Europe. The beer garden itself, seating several hundred under large chestnut trees on the Stadtamhof bank, dates the current pub building to 1859 with a 19th-century garden expansion, and offers arguably the best sit-down view of the Stone Bridge and old-town skyline in the city.

Typical beer-garden pricing — a half-liter beer roughly €4-5, mains roughly €10-16