The 10 Best Historic Sites in Franconia, Bavaria

Rothenburg has made a concerted effort to preserve its medieval heritage, and Old Town reflects the historic fruits of this labor.

This castle, the city's most prominent symbol since the 12th century, includes a museum, restaurant and formal gardens.

Museum under the open sky A walk around the Fränkisches Freilandmuseum is like travelling back in time through the past 700 years of rural life in Franconia. More than one hundred buildings, most of them furnished with authentic furniture from their period – farmsteads, craftsmen’s cottages, shepherd’s hut, barns, stables, bakeries, drying houses for fruit and flax, a school, a municipal building and a manor house – make for an amazing journey of discovery, showing how Franconian people lived, worked and built their homes in times gone by. Walk from village to village The buildings are arranged in sevengroups, representing different regions and themes. So, walking around the museum site feels a bit like walking from village to village, as people would have done in the past. Of particular interest are the “Middle Ages” group and the “Town” group, located in Bad Windsheim’s old town, with the Spitalkirche (hospital church), the “Museum Kirche in Franken”.

From the 10th century onwards, this town became an important link with the Slav peoples, especially those of Poland and Pomerania. During its period of greatest prosperity, from the 12th century onwards, the architecture of Bamberg strongly influenced northern Germany and Hungary. In the late 18th century it was the centre of the Enlightenment in southern Germany, with eminent philosophers and writers such as Hegel and Hoffmann living there.

World history was written in the courtroom of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. This is where leaders of the Nazi regime had to answer for their crimes before an international tribunal between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946. The trials had an enormous influence on the development of international criminal law right up to the present. Courtroom 600 remains a working courtroom to this day. The Nuremberg Trials Memorial ("Memorium Nürnberger Prozesse") is an information and documentation center located on the top floor of the Courthouse. In approximately 700 square meters of space, it provides insights about the defendants and their crimes, the Nuremberg Follow-Up Trials of 1946–49, and the impact of the Nuremberg Trials up to the present.