Things to do in Wiesbaden

Landmark · Kurhausplatz, city centre

The 1907 spa house with its colonnades, fountains and casino, facing a lawn and two fountains laid out on an English model — the centrepiece of Wiesbaden's century as an imperial spa town.

Local tip: The casino is genuinely open to ordinary visitors with ID and a dress code, and Dostoevsky's time at the tables here fed straight into The Gambler. Even without going in, walk the two colonnades — the north one is among the longest in Europe — and come back for a concert in the Friedrich-von-Thiersch-Saal, which is the finest room in the city.

Nature · North of the centre

A wooded hill over the city with a vineyard on its south face, a Russian Orthodox church with five golden domes, an open-air pool from 1934, and an 1888 funicular that runs on water ballast.

Local tip: Ride the funicular up at least once — the descending car fills a water tank and hauls the ascending one, so the whole thing works without a motor and has done for well over a century. Then walk down through the vineyard rather than riding back, and stop at the Opelbad for the view even if you do not swim.

Culture · Kranzplatz and around

The city's hottest spring, arriving at roughly 66°C at a public fountain, in the small quarter that marks the historic core of a place the Romans already came to for the water.

Local tip: Drink some. It is salty, ferrous and faintly alarming, and it is the reason the city exists — twenty-six springs feed the baths, the fountains and the heating of the old spa quarter. The Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme a few streets away is where you actually get into the water, and it is textile-free, which surprises people who have not read the sign.

Nightlife · Old town, behind the Marktkirche

A narrow lane of bars and restaurants under awnings beside the town hall, running up into the Bergkirchenviertel — the surviving pre-industrial quarter and the least formal part of the city.

Local tip: The Goldgasse is where visitors drink and the Bergkirchenviertel is where residents do; walk up the hill past the church and the prices fall while the rooms get better. On a warm evening the whole lane is outdoors, which is the one time Wiesbaden stops feeling like a government town.

Food · Schlossplatz and Dern'sches Gelände, city centre

Ten days in August when the Rheingau's growers set up across the squares of the city centre and Wiesbaden turns into one of the largest wine festivals in Germany.

Local tip: Buy the reusable glass rather than a plastic cup and treat it as a deposit; you carry it from stand to stand. Go early in the evening on a weekday — by Friday the Schlossplatz is impassable — and drink Riesling from the growers you have never heard of rather than the estates you have.

Neighborhood · The left bank of the Rhine, across the Theodor-Heuss-Brücke

Two Wiesbaden districts on the far side of the river with Mainz postal addresses, a Roman bridgehead fort at Kastel, and a Rhine frontage facing the Mainz skyline.

Local tip: This is the strangest thing about Wiesbaden and almost no guide mentions it: the districts are physically attached to Mainz, still carry Mainz in their postal names from before 1945, and are governed, taxed and registered by Wiesbaden in Hesse. Walk the Kostheim riverbank at sunset for the best view of Mainz there is — you cannot get it from Mainz.