Things to do in Nuremberg

Landmark · Altstadt

The imperial castle on the sandstone ridge above the old town, with five kilometres of surviving medieval wall running round it.

Local tip: The Sinwellturm view is the classic one, but the free part is better: walk the wall and the dry moat, which is a continuous green ditch circling the old town that locals use as a park and almost no visitor walks all the way round.

Culture · Southeast, by the Dutzendteich

The Nazi party rally grounds, including the unfinished Congress Hall which now houses a documentation centre about them.

Local tip: The site is enormous and deliberately not tidied up — the Zeppelinfeld grandstand is crumbling and the debate about whether to conserve it is very much live. Take the S-Bahn to Dutzendteich and allow three hours. The documentation centre is excellent and unflinching.

Landmark · Justizpalast, west of the centre

The courtroom where the leadership of Nazi Germany was tried in 1945 and 1946 — still an operating Bavarian courtroom, with a museum on the floor above.

Local tip: Because it is a working court, access to the room itself depends on the day's sittings — check before travelling. Walk from there to the Street of Human Rights beside the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, where thirty elements — twenty-seven concrete pillars, two floor plates and an oak tree — each carry one article of the Universal Declaration in German and in a different second language.

Nature · Schmausenbuck, east of the city

A zoo laid out in a disused sandstone quarry and the surrounding forest, and one of the most beautiful in Europe for that reason.

Local tip: The quarry walls and pine woods do most of the design work, and the site is large enough that a visit is a walk in a forest that happens to contain animals. A season ticket costs little more than two visits and locals treat it as a park.

Neighborhood · Immediately west of the old town

'GoHo' — the multicultural district just outside the walls that has become the city's centre of gravity for bars, studios and independent shops.

Local tip: The stretch around Austraße and the Jamnitzerplatz is where most of the good small restaurants are, and it is where the city's nightlife has migrated from the tourist-facing Altstadt. Still genuinely mixed rather than finished, which is the point.

Food · Under the old town, and out into Franconia

Four storeys of rock-cut cellars beneath the castle hill, dug for brewing, later used as a bomb-proof art store — and the beer gardens above them.

Local tip: The cellars are cold, cut by hand into sandstone, and in the war they held the imperial regalia and Dürer's work while the city above burned. Then get on a train to Upper Franconia and drink Kellerbier at a brewery tap — the region has the highest brewery density on earth, and almost nobody who moves to Nuremberg is told this in the first year.