Bamberg

Distance

28.0 km

Time

about 8 hours

Streets

124

Steps

5 streets with steps

Start point

Bamberger Dom

Phone needed while walking

no

Works offline

yes

Expires

never

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Bamberger Dom 1,500 points

  Four towers, and a choir at either end, so the Dom has two faces and no back at all. Walk all the way around it before you go inside. Then find the man on the horse in there and work out who he is. Nobody has settled that one yet.

• Alte Hofhaltung 500 points

  The broad wall on the square gives away nothing at all. Go in under the arch anyway. On the far side is a yard, closed in on every side by long half-timbered wings with open wooden galleries along them, and the noise stops at the gate. Most of the crowd out on the square never finds out.

• Altes Rathaus 500 points

  Everyone takes the same photograph from the same bridge. Take it, then go to the upstream side and lean over. A wooden house is sitting out there on the cutwater, in the current, with a whole building's worth of nerve.

• E.T.A.-Hoffmann-Theater 500 points

  A small square down at the southern edge, and the narrow house across from the playhouse is the point of coming. The man whose initials are on the sign kept house up there, and it is a museum now: two floors, low ceilings, steep stairs.

• Schlenkerla 500 points

  Barely wide enough for two, and the busiest strip of pavement on the hill. Everyone stands about in the lane here, because that is what happens outside this door, in any weather, and it has been happening for a very long time. Come down off the slope and see how tight it gets.

• Ausblick auf Klein Venedig 250 points

  This is the picture on every postcard of the town, and it is still worth the two minutes. Come late in the afternoon, when the light is on the far bank. Flat, short, and the only thing you have to do when you arrive is look.

• Gabelmann 250 points

  The meeting point. Everybody in this town gives directions from this corner, so you will hear the name said out loud before you get there. It sits where the busy streets cross on the flat side, and it is the easiest thing to find on the whole level.

• Marienbrunnen 250 points

  The far eastern corner of the map, and the quietest thing on it. Nobody walks out this far for it, which is exactly why I do. Houses on every side of a plain square, one thing in it worth stopping at, and nothing else asking for anything.

• Sankt Gangolf 250 points

  Out east, over the far arm of the river and past the line where the visitors turn back. That is the whole reason to go. The lanes on that side are wider, lower and greener than anything up on the hill, and the way out to it is flat the entire distance.

• Villa Concordia 250 points

  The side you meet first is not the side that matters. The good one faces south, down two wings set square to each other, over a walled terrace garden with a cascade running down it to the river. So cross at the next bridge and look back from the far bank.

Eating

Actual food.

People from Bamberg get called onion treaders. When the onion tops shot up too far, the gardeners strapped little boards to their shoes and walked the fields flat, so the strength went down into the bulb. The same gardeners dug licorice and sold it into Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. This town eats out of the ground first and out of the kitchen second, and the list below keeps that order.

Checked 13 September 2026.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Two halves, picked for two different reasons. The high side is the last of the Steigerwald running out towards the river, cut into steep spurs with deep valleys between them, which is exactly what you want underneath a castle. There has been a castle up there since at least the ninth century, as far as anyone can tell. The low side is an island, held between the two main arms of the Regnitz. One half is defensible and the other half is useful, and this town took both.

Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

902–1007

The Babenbergs, and then the crown. The castle on the hill was theirs. Early in the tenth century they lost a long quarrel with a rival house, and what they held around Bamberg became imperial property. By the end of that century the hill was the private seat of a Bavarian duke, who rebuilt it as somewhere to live well rather than somewhere to hold out.

Sources: www.deutsche-biographie.de; www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

1007–1802

The bishops, and they were princes as well. The church here became a bishopric in 1007, but a bishop was only an imperial prince once the emperor had invested him, and that investiture is what brought the coinage, the tolls, the mines, the right of safe conduct and the courts with it. By the end of the eighteenth century the territory held between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and ninety-five thousand people, two further capitals at Forchheim and Kronach, fifteen more towns and fifteen markets. It was never a closed country. Other people's lordships sat inside it like currants in a bun.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

1802–

Bavaria. On 22 November 1802 the elector of Bavaria issued the patent taking possession of the Franconian territories awarded to him, and a week after that, on 29 November, the last prince-bishop gave up the government. The document that made it lawful, the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, only turned up on 25 February 1803. Eight hundred years of arrangement, wound up in a week and legalised afterwards.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The bishopric was founded in 1007 and prepared from 1004 at the latest, and it was an imperial move at least as much as a church one, so the notion of founding a second Rome here was never far off. The churches were then laid out across the whole place as a cross. The cathedral chapter, St. Michael and St. Stephan fixed one axis, and two more collegiate churches closed the figure in 1058 and 1071. Only after that could the scattered settlements down here be seen together as one town at all. That is a great deal of plan for somewhere that looks improvised.

   Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1

2. The flat half of this level is five streets, and all five end up in the same place. Grüner Markt, Lange Straße, Kapuzinerstraße, Austraße and Keßlerstraße run together like the fingers of a hand towards the two bridges in the middle. Two of the five are markets, and which of those two came first is still an open question; by the twelfth century they were both there. Whichever finger you start on, you come out at the water.

   Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2

3. East of the right arm of the river the town stops behaving like a town. That side is the Gärtnerstadt, the gardeners' quarter, and it still looks half rural: low houses with their gables to the street and large open growing ground behind them. The gardeners' settlements attached themselves to the Theuerstadt and to the old Steinweg from the fourteenth century at the latest, split into an upper and a lower one. You walk both of those names on this level. Theuerstadt is still called that, and part of the Steinweg is now Obere Königstraße. A place that has been growing its own dinner for seven hundred years has my full attention.

   Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 3

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 124streets
• 1,688dots
• 22.5km of street
• 28.0km on foot
• 8hours at a stroll