Things to do in Bremen

Landmark · Altstadt

The 15th-century town hall with its Weser Renaissance facade and the 1404 Roland statue in front of it, jointly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004 as symbols of civic self-government.

Local tip: The Ratskeller beneath the Rathaus holds one of the oldest wine cellars in Germany, including barrels of Rüdesheim from the 1650s that are not for drinking. Book the guided Rathaus tour rather than admiring the outside — the upper hall is where the Schaffermahlzeit has been held every February since 1545, which makes it plausibly the oldest continuously observed banquet anywhere.

Neighborhood · East of the Altstadt

A single long street of bars, second-hand shops, cinemas and 19th-century terraces that is Bremen's cultural centre of gravity, ending at the Sielwall crossroads.

Local tip: The Sielwall corner is the city's unofficial meeting point and the Sielwallfähre crosses the Weser from the end of it in summer. Ostertorsteinweg's bars run late on weeknights in a way the rest of the city does not — if you want to know whether you will like living in Bremen, spend a Wednesday evening here rather than a Saturday.

Culture · Between Marktplatz and the Weser

A 110-metre street rebuilt in the 1920s and 30s by the coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius as a work of Expressionist brick architecture — one of the strangest streets in Germany and condemned as degenerate by the Nazis.

Local tip: Stand under the Glockenspiel at noon, three or four in the afternoon and it plays on Meissen porcelain bells while a panel rotates through Atlantic crossings. The Paula Modersohn-Becker museum halfway along was the first museum in the world dedicated to a woman painter — go for that rather than the souvenir shops.

Nature · North of the Hauptbahnhof

A 200-hectare landscape park running from behind the main station into the Stadtwald, laid out from 1866 and still owned and financed by a citizens' association rather than the city.

Local tip: It takes no regular municipal money — it runs on donations, a lottery and the cafés inside it, which is the most Bremen fact about Bremen. Rent a rowing boat on the Emmasee, and in autumn walk the whole length to the Stadtwald; the park starts three minutes from the station platform, which no other German city of this size manages.

Nightlife · The Weser bank, west of the Altstadt

The old riverside quay turned into a promenade of bars and moored ships, running west into the Überseestadt — 300 hectares of former harbour basin being rebuilt into offices, lofts and studios.

Local tip: The Schlachte is where the city drinks outdoors in summer and where the Christmas market's Hanseatic half sits in December. Keep walking west past it: the Überseestadt's Speicher XI holds the university's art college and a port museum, and the mix of container cranes and new build is a better evening walk than the tourist stretch.

Landmark · Universität Bremen campus, Horn-Lehe

A 146-metre drop tower on the university campus where experiments fall 110 metres in an evacuated tube to buy 4.74 seconds of near-weightlessness — one of very few facilities of its kind anywhere.

Local tip: It is visible from half the city and almost nobody who lives here knows what it is for. ZARM runs public tours and open days; going on one explains in twenty minutes why an aerospace cluster ended up in a Hanseatic port town, which no museum in the city does.