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Bavaria · Old Town

Landshut

A self-guided walking tour of the Landshut Old Town.

Every street on the menu.

Every street in the Old Town of Landshut is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.

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At a glance

Plan your walk.

Distance
16.9 km
Time
about 5 hours
Streets
73
Steps
4 streets with steps
Start point
Basilika Sankt Martin
Phone needed while walking
no
Works offline
yes
Expires
never

The Old Town

Every street, drawn.

Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

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

  • Basilika Sankt Martin 1,500 points

    You will see it before you reach it. It steps out in front of the house line at the top of the Altstadt and takes over the whole street. Look up. Then look up again.

  • Burg Trausnitz 500 points

    Up the Hofberg, at the top of a climb you will feel in your legs. The town began at its foot. Steep streets are chewy. I take my time with them.

  • Rathaus Landshut 500 points

    Halfway along the Altstadt, where the gables get competitive. Every front on this street is trying to out-step the one next to it, and this one wins. There is a room upstairs I am not going to describe.

  • Stadtresidenz 500 points

    From the front it keeps its head down and lines up with the houses on either side. Go through the gateway. The courtyard behind does not belong on this side of the Alps, and that is the whole point of it.

  • Heilig Geist 250 points

    Walk north along the Altstadt until the street runs out. That roof is what stops it. A hospital stood on this spot by 1209, right where the crossing over the Isar was, so this end of town has been looking after arrivals for a very long time.

  • Ländtor 250 points

    You walk through this one rather than past it. There were once a lot more like it around the edge of the Old Town, and now there are two. Arches are my favourite shape. You can chew a doorway from both sides.

  • Schanzl 250 points

    About twenty minutes uphill from the Altstadt, on a signposted path. This is the spot where everybody stops and turns round. I do not blame them. It is a good place to be still and hungry at the same time.

  • Ursulinenkirche 250 points

    Small, at the north end of the Neustadt, and easy to walk straight past. The last of the orders to arrive in town settled here, and it got the quiet corner. There is a lane named after it right beside the door.

Eating

Actual food.

Lower Bavaria turns out about eighty per cent of the outdoor cucumbers Bavaria pickles, on what the state register calls the largest unbroken cucumber growing area in the European Union. Every second pickled cucumber eaten in Germany starts here. So this is a keeping kitchen: salted, smoked, soured, stored. The other half is flour and potatoes, which is what you get on that much flat ground. Nothing here is in a hurry, and neither am I.

With meat

  • Niederbayerisches Schwarzgeräuchertes

    Pork, dry salted, then two to three weeks in brine, then four to five days of smoke over pine and fir at fifty degrees. That is how meat got through a winter here. Lower Bavaria eats it with sauerkraut or with Gwichste, and the Gwichste are further down this list.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Niederbayerisches Schwarzgeräuchertes

  • Schuchsen

    Flat fried pastry, fifteen centimetres across and hollow in the middle. The Landshut version leaves the quark out: rye flour, boiled pressed potatoes, wheat flour. They go beside soup, vegetables or mushrooms, or with sugar next to a coffee. Around here they run from Saint George's day, the twenty fourth of April, to Kirchweih on the third Sunday in October.

    They are baked out in hot fat. Ask at the counter what kind, if that matters to you.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Schuchsen

  • Milzwurst

    Sixty five per cent veal sausage meat, twenty five per cent pork, ten per cent spleen, usually beef. It comes sliced and browned in a pan, or roasted whole for about two hours. It tastes a good deal less alarming than the ingredient list reads.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Milzwurst

Vegetarian

Two, and that is the honest count. Bavaria's meat free tradition runs mostly through Mehlspeisen, the sweet flour dishes, and the state register lists fewer of them by name than you would expect. What is here is real. A third would not be.

  • Rupfhauben

    A Mehlspeise, which in Bavaria means a flour dish that counts as a whole meal and happens to be sweet. In the Rottal it is built from pasta dough, elsewhere from potato dough, and it arrives with a compote of whatever fruit the season has.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Rupfhauben

  • Dampfnudel

    Yeast dough cooked in milk. In Bavaria it arrives with vanilla sauce or fruit sauce, either as a dessert or as a sweet main course. The main course is the correct choice.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Dampfnudel

Vegan

Two, and both are accidents of history rather than intention. A dumpling of rye, salt and water was cheap food and not a way of eating, and a cucumber keeps because keeping was the whole point. The traditional plant repertoire here really is this short. Stretching it would be the worse answer.

  • Gwichste

    Rye flour, a pinch of salt, water. That is the whole dumpling. The name is about the shine on them, which somebody once decided looked like a freshly polished shoe.

    They usually arrive under smoked pork. Ask for them on their own.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Gwichste

  • Bayerische Gewürzgurken

    Field cucumbers, made to keep with vinegar, salt, sugar and herbs. About eighty per cent of Bavaria's come from the district Landshut sits in, and every second one eaten in Germany starts here. Buy a jar. This is the local produce, whatever the signboards out front say it is.

    Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Bayerische Gewürzgurken

Late breakfast

Dinner

Checked 10 September 2026.

Name origin

Why it is called Landshut.

Landshut is a job description. The name means the guard of the land, and the castle above the river did the guarding. It stands where important trade roads crossed and where you could get over the Isar, which is exactly the sort of place worth keeping an eye on. A crossroads is also where the most streets meet. For me that is the same sentence.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Look at the slope. The castle sits on top of a steep bank on the right side of the Isar, and the town lies at its foot, flat, in the strip between hill and water. Several old trade roads met here, and at the north end you could get across the river. That is the whole reason there is a town. Everything after that is seasoning.

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

Why then

When the first stone went down.

1204, and we know because a monk wrote it down. The annals of Abbot Hermann of Niederaltaich record that Duke Ludwig began building the castle and the town in that year. Not one and then the other. Both at once. Most towns grow. This one was decided.

Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

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

1204–1255

The Wittelsbachs, from a standing start. Ludwig der Kelheimer put the castle on the hill and the town at its foot in the same year, and both filled up fast. A hospital by the river crossing is already on record in 1209. In 1231 his widow Ludmilla founded an abbey on the far bank. Fifty years in, this was a working town with a skyline.

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

1255–1503

The dukes of Lower Bavaria, and this is the stretch that built most of what you will walk past. The land was divided in 1255 and Landshut went to Heinrich XIII, who made it his capital and his residence. It stayed one for two and a half centuries, through the court of the three rich dukes, until the Landshut line ran out in 1503. The town was never quite that important again. It also never had to be.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2

1838–

The state, in a monastery. Lower Bavaria's government was set up in 1808 with its seat in Passau, and in 1838 it was moved here, into the former Dominican house. In 1932 it was dissolved to save money and folded into the Oberpfalz. In 1956 it came back to the same building. It is still in there. Look for the Dominikanerpassage.

Sources: regierung.niederbayern.bayern.de

The emblem

What the shield means.

Three iron hats, two above one, blue on silver. The blazon calls them Eisenhüte, and they are a pun on the town's own name: Lands-Hut. Silver and blue are the Bavarian dukes' colours, and blue doubles as the colour of the iron. The oldest seal carrying them survives from 1275. A later story says an emperor handed the arms over as a reward. The seals had them first.

Sources: www.hdbg.eu

Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

  1. The Old Town is not one shape, it is five. The oldest part runs from the south end of the Altstadt to the Steckengasse, and the town was widened four more times after that. The second widening laid out the Neustadt: broad, almost dead straight, and preserved so nearly undisturbed that the heritage register calls it a model example of Gothic town planning. Altstadt and Neustadt are not districts here. They are two streets, side by side.

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

  2. Walk the south-east side of the Altstadt and you go under the houses rather than past them. Vaulted arcades run along the fronts there, taking the full width of each building they belong to. This is the oldest stretch of the town and the arcades are still in place. Shade in August, dry in November, and the echo is worth the detour on its own.

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

  3. In 1516 a duke turned up and the town started importing taste. Ludwig X fetched his builders from Mantua, and the Renaissance moved in behind them: painted house fronts, of which the Landschaftshaus keeps the finest, and splendid arcaded galleries stacked up in courtyard after courtyard. Sculptors followed, Hans Leinberger and Stephan Rottaler among them. For a while this was where art in Old Bavaria happened.

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

Street words

What the names on the signs mean.

Altstadt
Everywhere else this means the old part of town. Here it is a street, the wide one, and the town started at its southern end. Ask for the Altstadt and somebody will point you at a road.
Neustadt
The other one, a block east, and new in the thirteenth century. It runs broad and almost perfectly straight, which after the Altstadt's wandering feels like somebody finally reached for a ruler.
Gasse
A lane, and the ordinary word for a street here. Most of the names in this Old Town end in it. Kramergasse, Bindergasse, Rosengasse. Each one of those is a course.
Gäßchen
A little lane, and the ending is not being modest: Balsgäßchen, Heißgäßchen, Taubengäßchen, Mesner-Ott-Gäßchen. They are the short cuts between the two big streets, and they are barely wide enough for the name they have.
Passage
A covered way straight through a block, and there are several: Ainmillerpassage, Dominikanerpassage, Alte-Post-Passage. The plots here are narrow at the street and run a long way back. A passage is the way through one.

The size of it

Walk it in a day: Landshut in numbers.

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

  • 73streets
  • 847dots
  • 13.3km of street
  • 16.9km on foot
  • 4.8hours at a stroll

Nearby

Old Towns close to this one.

The game

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