Bavaria · Old Town
Regensburg
A self-guided walking tour of the Regensburg Old Town, every street in two days.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Regensburg 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.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 37.2 km
- Time
- about 10.5 hours
- Streets
- 196
- Steps
- 4 streets with steps
- Start point
- Dom Sankt Peter
- 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.
Dom Sankt Peter 1,500 points
You will keep meeting it. Half the streets on this level are aimed at it, and it appears at the end of them without warning, several sizes larger than the lane prepared you for. Come at it out of a narrow one rather than across the open. This is the one I do not save for later.
Altes Rathaus 500 points
Stand back on the square and count the windows along the front. They go in fours, all the way along, except the last group before the big portal, which has three. The portal came later and swallowed the fourth one whole. It is still in there, facing a wall.
Historische Wurstkuchl 500 points
The smallest house on the waterfront: one low room, a chimney, and a doorway you have to stoop at. Most days there is a queue outside, and it moves. Join it. Standing about is something I am extremely good at.
Schloss St. Emmeram 500 points
The south-west corner of the level belongs to one household, and you will work that out from the wall: it runs and runs along the Fürst-Anselm-Allee and hardly ever offers a door. Stay with it as far as the Emmeramsplatz and go in under the arch. A whole quarter, shut away, and the gate open.
Schottenkirche St. Jakob 500 points
It stands on the Jakobstraße just past the Bismarckplatz: thick walls and round arches. The name says Scots. The first monks here were not. Take the side along the street slowly. Slow is the only speed I come in.
Steinerne Brücke 500 points
Walk out to the middle and stop. Turn round. The whole waterfront lines up in front of you at once, towers, roofs and all, and nowhere inside the town lets you stand far enough back to see it like that. Then keep going. Stone all the way over, and plenty of it. That is a bridge I can chew on.
Dreieinigkeitskirche 250 points
Push the door open. Inside is like nowhere else in this town: white walls, timber galleries on three sides, and every bench pointed at the pulpit instead of the altar. Built for listening. Then find the way up.
Herz Jesu 250 points
The western edge of the level. It announces itself from a long way off: a great blunt block where everything around it is small and crooked. Walk round the back and look at the tower. It was never completed, and it has stood like that for close to a hundred years.
Herzogspark 250 points
The far west end of the walk, and the only place on it that gives underfoot. Big trees, a fountain, and a bastion of 1525 sitting in among them with nothing left to do. Every other course today is masonry. This one is the salad.
Historisches Museum 250 points
This is where the birth certificate is kept. A carved slab, turned up by accident a hundred years ago, which lets this town date itself to the year. Very few towns can. Outside, a square most walkers are past before they notice it.
Jesuitenplatz 250 points
A small square with almost nothing on it, one street away from the noise. Two minutes here and the lane you came out of sounds a long way off. Between two heavy courses, I like a plain one.
Ostentor 250 points
The far eastern end of the walk, and the last gate left standing on this side. Traffic squeezes under it one lane at a time. Turn round once you are out: from the far side it is a different building altogether.
Porta praetoria 250 points
Two arches set into a wall behind the Dom, with the pavement in front of them sunk to the level they were built at. Everybody else walks past above them without a glance. Go down and put a hand on the blocks.
Stift zu Unserer Lieben Frau zur Alten Kapelle 250 points
It sits between the Kapellengasse and the Alter Kornmarkt, a short step from the Dom, and most people walk straight past it on their way there. Don't. Slow down and look at the walls. I never judge a loaf by its crust.
Eating
Actual food.
Regensburg has been feeding other people's business for two thousand years. First a Roman garrison, then a bridge that every cart between Italy and Bohemia had to cross, then a hundred and forty three years of envoys who came for a sitting of the imperial diet in 1663 and were somehow still here in 1806. Germany's first coffee house opened for them in 1686. What the town kept is the food that keeps: smoked in a pantry, alive in a pond, or baked as bread.
Meat and fish
Regensburger
The city wrote its own name on a sausage, ten centimetres long and not quite four thick, smoked over beech and then scalded. Nobody here calls it that. Ask for a Knacker, which is the noise it makes when you bite it, and the counter will know exactly what you mean.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Oberpfälzer Karpfen
Mirror carp out of ponds that a Cistercian house began digging in 1132, and the Upper Palatinate has gone on digging them for nearly a thousand years since. It is what a fast day meant here, and its name has carried EU protection since 2002. A fish with a monastery behind it and a file number in front.
This is a cold months dish. Ask for it between September and April; in summer it is still growing.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Oberpfälzer Bauernseufzer
A dark smoked pork bratwurst, fifteen to twenty centimetres, warmed through in hot water and eaten with freshly grated horseradish and dark bread. Farmers hung the good ones in the pantry for visitors, and the register says handing one over made a few of them sigh out loud. That is the whole of the name.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Vegetarian
Erdäpfelkas
Boiled potatoes crushed with onion and sour cream into a thick spread, salt and pepper, and despite the name not a gram of cheese anywhere in it. It came up in the years after the war, when there was nothing else to put on a working man's bread. Cheap, quick, and still on the Brotzeit board.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Zwetschgenschmie
An Upper Palatinate yeast cake baked flat on a tray with something spread over it, usually plums. It belongs to the church fair and to Easter, and it is an afternoon thing, cut in squares straight off the sheet. When it is not plums the spread is semolina, poppy seed or quark, and I have yet to object to any of them.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Chamer Kampl
A honey gingerbread cut to the shape of a five toothed comb, which is the coat of arms of Cham up the road. The town used to cart a giant one to Nuremberg every New Year's Day, as a token between two trading towns. I approve of any letter you can eat on arrival.
It is baked only between Christmas and New Year. Ask in that week or wait a year.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Vegan
Two, and the reason sits in the ground rather than in the kitchen. The Upper Palatinate is cold upland, and the old line about it runs ten months of winter and two months of cold, so the plant food that survived is what a poor house could make out of bread, roots and the forest floor. And when a fast day came round, this town had a thousand years of fish ponds to reach for instead. The list is short because the answer here was usually a carp.
Brotsuppe
Old bread, water, onion and whatever herbs the house keeps, cooked down until it is a meal again. It was the poor household's supper and it was what everybody ate through Lent. In a town whose market square is still called the grain market, this is the oldest recipe there is. Nothing goes stale here. It just gets cooked twice.
Ask what the soup was started with. Plenty of kitchens begin it with stock from meat.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Bayerische Steinpilze
Porcini out of the forests north and east of here, firm, white inside, mild and a little nutty. After the war they were what a household with no money ate, and now they are sold as a delicacy, which is what happens to anything that tastes good and hides. Two wet weeks and mild weather and the whole floor of the wood has them.
Ask for them out of the oil pan. The butter is usually the only thing in the way.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Late breakfast
Malefiz come for the one thing: the plant breakfast plate
Pfarrergasse 6
Pfarrergasse, a lane you only walk down on purpose. Breakfast is the entire point here and the kitchen stops in the early afternoon, so this is a morning house that simply leaves its door open longer. The plant plate swaps the egg for pickled vegetables, which is a braver answer than leaving a gap, and there are four bowls standing next to it. Come for the plate you would never assemble at home.
- Mon09:00–15:00
- Tue09:00–15:00
- Wed09:00–01:00
- Thu09:00–01:00
- Fri09:00–01:00
- Sat09:00–01:00
- Sun09:00–19:00
The kitchen stops at two on weekdays and at three at the weekend. On Monday and Tuesday the whole house shuts at three.
Sources: STILPUNKTE, stadtleben GmbH, Falstaff
Rough Surface Coffee where locals go
Am Peterstor 1a
Am Peterstor, on the edge of the walk, looking out towards the Schlosspark. The plates are brunch of the modern kind: kimchi pancakes with avocado, poached organic eggs on a brioche baked in the house, and sourdough from flour milled in Sinzing. The eggs and the vegetables both come from near Regensburg. I have gone two thousand years without kimchi pancakes at breakfast, which now looks like an oversight.
- Mon09:00–18:00
- Tueclosed
- Wed09:00–18:00
- Thu09:00–18:00
- Fri09:00–18:00
- Sat09:00–18:00
- Sun09:00–18:00
Closed on Tuesday. The kitchen stops at half past two and the door shuts at six.
Sources: European Coffee Trip, STILPUNKTE
Afternoon coffee
Cafe-Bar the old one
Gesandtenstraße 14
Gesandtenstraße, across from the Dreieinigkeitskirche. In 1985 a butcher's shop became a café in the Italian style. The Art Nouveau glass ceiling and the seamless tiles are still there. Today the espresso is pulled at that counter, and the little sandwiches in the glass case are known across town. In 2012 the lease was not renewed. More than thirteen hundred guests signed within four weeks, and the house stayed. I would have signed too, with my mouth full.
- Mon08:00–02:00
- Tue08:00–02:00
- Wed08:00–02:00
- Thu08:00–02:00
- Fri08:00–02:00
- Sat09:00–02:00
- Sun13:00–02:00
Come by day. In the evening it turns into a bar and stays open until two in the morning, and on Sundays and holidays the door only opens at one in the afternoon.
Sources: Regensburg Digital, Battenberg-Gietl Verlag
Torreo come for the one thing: the coffee roasted in the shop itself
Rote-Hahnen-Gasse 1a
Rote-Hahnen-Gasse, in a shop that roasts its own coffee on the premises. The beans go through the drum in small batches, for espresso and for filter, and they are sold by the bag as well. The menu is coffee, a croissant and the beans, which is fair when the beans are the point. From the drum to the cup is a few metres, about as far as I travel in a good century.
- Monclosed
- Tue10:30–18:00
- Wed10:30–18:00
- Thu10:30–18:00
- Fri10:30–18:00
- Sat10:00–18:00
- Sunclosed
Closed on Sunday and Monday. On the other days the door shuts at six.
Sources: European Coffee Trip, STILPUNKTE
kuchenbar. where locals go
Am Protzenweiher 1
North over both arms of the water, on a corner no visitor reaches by accident. Twenty five cakes on the counter, every one baked in the house, and a different set of them tomorrow. Breakfast is a list you tick rather than a platter you are handed, and in summer they make the ice cream too. A cake counter that changes daily is a cake counter I trust.
- Mon11:00–18:00
- Tue11:00–18:00
- Wed11:00–18:00
- Thu11:00–18:00
- Fri11:00–18:00
- Sat11:00–18:00
- Sun11:00–18:00
Open every day from eleven until six. There is no evening here.
Sources: Der Feinschmecker, nordbayern.de (Verlag Nürnberger Presse), STILPUNKTE
Dinner
Spitalgarten the old one
Sankt-Katharinen-Platz 1
Over the water in Stadtamhof, under old chestnut trees, with the whole medieval skyline on the far bank while you eat. Somebody has been feeding guests on this ground since 1230, on land that belongs to a hospital foundation older than that. The kitchen is Bavarian and seasonal and buys close to home; duck with red cabbage and a bread dumpling is what I would order. Seven hundred years of practice went into that dumpling.
- Mon11:00–23:00
- Tue11:00–23:00
- Wed11:00–23:00
- Thu11:00–23:00
- Fri11:00–23:00
- Sat11:00–23:00
- Sun11:00–22:00
Open every day, but the warm kitchen closes at nine while the tables stay out a good while longer.
Sources: Slow Food Deutschland, GenussKüche Bayern (Bayern Tourist GmbH)
Orphée come for the one thing: the room unchanged since 1896
Untere Bachgasse 8
Untere Bachgasse, behind a door where almost nothing has changed since 1896: red plush benches, marble table tops, dark panelling and Thonet chairs in the back room. The kitchen is French and it means it, so take the quiche at midday or the bouillabaisse at night. You come here for the room. The food is the excuse, and it happens to be a good one.
- Mon08:00–01:00
- Tue08:00–01:00
- Wed08:00–01:00
- Thu08:00–01:00
- Fri08:00–01:00
- Sat08:00–01:00
- Sun08:00–01:00
Open every day from eight in the morning. They take no table bookings on Saturday daytime, or on Sunday before noon.
Sources: Der Feinschmecker, Schlemmer Atlas
Gravenreuther where locals go
Hinter der Grieb 10
Hinter der Grieb, in a patrician house whose walls have stood for centuries. Carved figures on the brackets show colourful local characters of the nineteenth century. The kitchen stays regional: schnitzel, roast pork, sausage salad, fish and soups. A guide to Regensburg's Wirtshäuser takes only the places the region itself would call one, and it took this house. I would order the roast pork. The walls have waited centuries, and they can wait until I finish.
- Mon17:00–22:00
- Tue17:00–22:00
- Wed17:00–22:00
- Thu17:00–22:00
- Fri17:00–23:00
- Sat11:00–23:00
- Sun11:00–21:00
Turn off the main streets into the side lane to find it. On weekdays the door opens at five in the evening, so lunch here means the weekend.
Sources: Battenberg-Gietl Verlag
Checked 29 September 2026.
With kids
Short legs, big appetite.
The streets here are full of dots to collect, and a child on a hunt forgets to be tired. Here is a short loop for the smallest walkers.
- The loop
- Steinerne Brücke, Dom Sankt Peter, Jesuitenplatz, Altes Rathaus, and back to the start
- Distance
- 2.0 km
- Time
- about 40 minutes of walking at a child's pace (3 km/h)
- Steps
- on Am Mittelmünster
- Playgrounds
- 2 near the loop
- Public toilets
- 3 near the loop, 1 with a changing table
- Drinking water
- 1 near the loop
- Ice cream
- 5 near the loop
Near the loop means within 150 m of it, counted from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Name origin
Why it is called Regensburg.
A small river called the Regen comes into the Danube just east of the Old Town, and the Roman fort here was named after it: the castle on the Regen. Before the Romans there was a Celtic name, Radasbona, and nobody kept it. By the sixth century the place was being called Reganespurc. Say that for fourteen hundred years and it wears down to Regensburg. I like a name you can still see the wear on.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.regensburg.de
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The Danube comes up out of Bavaria, reaches its most northerly point right here, and bends away south-east again. The Regen arrives from the north at the same bend. Two rivers and a land route all have to settle their business inside the same few hundred metres, and whoever sat on that stretch took a share of everything that went through it: Italy in one direction, Bohemia and Russia and Byzantium in the other. A good place to put a town. For a rock, an outstanding one.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.regensburg.de
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Not here, and not at the first attempt. About a hundred years before the town you are walking, the Romans put a small post out at Kumpfmühl, south-west of this ground, to keep an eye on the river frontier. Around the year 80. Nothing of it stands above ground now: it is an entry in the heritage register with two roads, two burial grounds and a farm attached. The town proper started later and larger, on the ground under your shoes.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.regensburg.de; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 185
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 80-350
Rome, and for longer than it looks. A small post watched the river from about the year 80, and a century later the garrison was multiplied and stayed. From the first half of the third century the frontier grew unquiet, troop numbers fell, and civilians moved into the buildings that emptied, for the walls around them. By the middle of the fourth century the Roman machinery had stopped working and the people here were left to themselves. Hardly anyone left. They simply stopped being Roman.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.regensburg.de
- 500-788
The dukes. From the sixth century the old camp, by then called Reganespurc, was the residence of the Agilolfing dukes and the first capital Bavaria had. In 739 Boniface founded the diocese here. In 788 Charlemagne removed Tassilo III, the last of the family, from office, and the line ended. The palace quarter they left behind is still readable in the street plan, between the Alte Kapelle, the Dom and Niedermünster.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
- 1245-1803
The townspeople, and they had to argue for it. Lordship over the town belonged to the bishop and had been in dispute for generations when, in 1245, Emperor Frederick II granted the town the right to set a mayor and a council of its own. That made it a free imperial city, and it stayed one until 1803. It also made a town hall necessary, which is why there is one, and why it is where it is.
Sources: www.regensburg.de; www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de; www.regensburg.de
- 1810-
Bavaria. The free imperial city ended in 1803, and what was left became the ecclesiastical principality of Regensburg under Karl Theodor von Dalberg. In 1810 Napoleon made Dalberg hand it over to the newly formed Kingdom of Bavaria, and Regensburg became the capital of a Bavarian district that took its name from the same little river the city did. It has been Bavarian ever since. After everything that came before, that counts as settled.
Sources: www.regensburg.de
The emblem
What the shield means.
Two silver keys crossed on a red field. They are Peter's keys, and Peter is patron of both the city and its Dom. The picture came out of the seals: the oldest of them, on a charter of 1211, shows him enthroned with one heavy key over his shoulder and a book in his other hand, and the arms grew out of that. The city archive puts the earliest arms on a stone tablet of 1320, cut to mark the start of the wall along the Danube. No beast, no bird, just the ironmongery, which I find restful.
Sources: srv19.regensburg.de; www.regensburg.de
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The camp wall never went away. People built on it, into it and around it, and the heritage register now lists it house by house: a remnant in the east cellar wall on Erhardigasse, its line running through the inside of a house of 1833 at Am Peterstor, standing masonry in a house Unter den Schwibbögen. It is holding up shops and flats today. No old stone I know of is better employed.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 51; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 17; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 145
The bridge over the Danube went up between 1135 and 1146: fifteen barrel-vaulted arches of Danube limestone and green sandstone, the roadway rising slightly towards the middle. The city calls it the building marvel of the Middle Ages and says later bridges were built in its image, Prague's Charles Bridge among them. Everything Regensburg became, it became because it owned this way over the water.
Look up on the Watmarkt. Two towers stand there seven storeys tall, wedged into the block like everything else: the Baumburger Turm, whose timbers date it to 1276/77, and the Bräunelturm, probably a hundred years older again. Trading families built them to be seen over the roofs, and the heritage register calls this density of them unique. There is a good deal more building above the shop signs here than the shop signs admit to.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 154; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 155; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1; www.regensburg.de
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Gasse
- The plain word for a street here, and the ending you will meet most: Adlergasse, Glockengasse, Kramgasse, Tändlergasse, Pfauengasse. Count the names that end in it and you have most of the level.
- Gäßchen / Gässel
- The same thing, smaller, and said the Bavarian way: Rehgäßchen, Spatzengäßchen, Taubengäßchen, Kuhgässel, Röhrlgässel. One of them is called Gäßchen ohne End, a little lane without an end. That is a promise, and I intend to hold it to that.
- Markt
- A market square, named after what stood on it. Watmarkt sold cloth, Krauterermarkt herbs, Kohlenmarkt coal, Fischmarkt fish, Alter Kornmarkt grain. Say what you are selling and the address writes itself.
- Hof
- A walled yard behind a gate, and in this town usually somebody's town house: Am Brixener Hof, Am Königshof, Fechthof, Schulhof. Bishops from seven dioceses and a long list of counts each kept one here, and the yards are still there behind the doors.
- Rote-, Weiße-, Goldene-
- Before house numbers a house had a sign, and the street took its name off the sign: Rote-Hahnen-Gasse, Weiße-Lilien-Straße, Goldene-Bären-Straße, Blaue-Stern-Gasse, Schwarze-Bären-Straße. A colour and an animal will find an address faster than a number will.
- Tor
- A gate. Am Peterstor and Am Prebrunntor are addresses sitting on the line of the old fortification, and the gates they are named after are not there any more. The names went on pointing at them anyway.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Regensburg in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 196streets
- 1,842dots
- 29.9km of street
- 37.2km on foot
- 10.5hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.