Bavaria · Old Town
Wasserburg am Inn
A self-guided walking tour of the Wasserburg am Inn Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Wasserburg am Inn 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
- 14.5 km
- Time
- about 4 hours
- Streets
- 61
- Steps
- 3 streets with steps
- Start point
- Wasserburg
- 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.
Wasserburg 1,500 points
Stepped gables on the neck of land, right where the peninsula stops being a peninsula. Whoever held this held the bridge, the salt and the town. The lane called Auf der Burg runs straight through it.
Brucktor 500 points
The gate you pass through on the way to the bridge, four storeys of it, wedged between the old hospital and the town house. Look up as you go under.
Frauenkirche 500 points
The smaller church, standing right in the market space instead of beside it, with a slim tower over a hall you walk through.
St. Jakob 500 points
Unrendered brick with a tower of tuff blocks, set in the crook between castle hill and town, out of the water's reach. The parish church stands apart from the market on purpose.
Hungerturm 250 points
A square tower with battlements at the top of Im Hag, planted where the town's defences turned a corner. It has windows now, which tells you most of what became of it.
Mauthaus 250 points
A corner house at the market with vaulted arcades at street level, standing where the road bends. Money changed hands here for centuries.
Pulverturm 250 points
A squat tower at the western corner of the old defences. The street that runs past it gives the game away, which saves me the trouble.
Rathaus 250 points
Two stepped gables of unequal height on Marienplatz, one wider and taller than its neighbour. Step inside and look down. I am not telling you why.
Eating
Actual food.
Twenty four bakers, in a town you can walk round in an hour. That is the count for 1668. A bread bench here was property you could sell, and one changed hands in 1347 under the town's own law. Most of what came along this river was passing through. The grain got off.
Meat and fish
Hauberlinge
Wheat and rye with a great deal of caraway, spooned into hot lard a tablespoon at a time and turned once. Known around Haag, Dorfen, Erding and Mühldorf, and nowhere else in Bavaria. A pastry with a catchment area.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern, Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Ernährung
Bayerischer Leberkäse
There is no liver in it. A butcher here bakes it twice a day, once for the mid morning Brotzeit and again about four. The crusty end piece is called the Scherzel. Ask for it or somebody else will.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Chiemsee-Fischwürst
Fish put through the machine bones and all, cooked in sausage shape and fried crisp. Fisher families on the Chiemsee made them because their children would not eat anything with bones. Fish was always the fasting food here. This is how it got past a child.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Vegetarian
Semmelknödel
Bread rolls, egg, onion and milk rolled into a ball and boiled. The good part is the next day. Slice the cold ones, fry them crisp, break a couple of eggs over the pan and eat them with salad.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Rohrnudeln
Yeast blocks the size of your fist, baked in a tin so they grow into each other. Torn apart hot, with vanilla sauce or fruit compote. This was the Friday lunch when Friday meant no meat. Nobody has told the kitchens.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Zwetschgenbavesen
Two slices of white bread soaked in milk with plum jam between them, breaded, fried and dusted with cinnamon sugar. They were invented to use up stale bread. They got so popular that bakers now bake bread specially to make them.
Ask what is in the pan. Lard is the traditional answer and butter fat is the common one.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Vegan
Two, and there is a document explaining why. In 1485 Count Sigmund of Haag, up the road from here, wrote to Rome about Lent. He wanted his people allowed to bake with lard, because Italian olive oil was dear and nobody here liked it. The Pope said yes. The plant kitchen lost that argument five hundred years ago and the pastry is named after the permission slip.
Bayerische Rübe
A small white turnip, sown into the stubble once the grain comes off. It sits so deep that you dig it out with a fork at All Saints. It went into a brown flour sauce and was Saturday's meal for people with no money. The register calls that a fasting dish, which is a kind way to put it.
Ask about the sauce. It is loosened with meat broth as often as with water.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Kletzenbrot
Pears dried whole in the oven's leftover heat, then worked into a dark loaf with plums, nuts and spice. Nothing sweetened it but the fruit. The father of the house cut it on Christmas Eve and handed it round, and the animals in the barn got a piece too.
Advent and Christmas only. Ask about honey and butter, because the old recipe had neither.
Sources: GenussErbe Bayern
Late breakfast
Boulevard 10 the old one
Ledererzeile 10
Same family, same house on the Ledererzeile since the 1950s. The ground floor has been a delicatessen, a café, a pizzeria and a restaurant, and it has never really stopped feeding people. Breakfast here, produce from farms around the town, and a kitchen that cooks for meat eaters, vegetarians and vegans without making a production of it.
- Monclosed
- Tueclosed
- Wed09:00–18:00
- Thu09:00–18:00
- Fri09:00–18:00
- Sat09:00–18:00
- Sun09:00–18:00
Sources: Slow Food Deutschland, Stadt Wasserburg a. Inn, Chiemsee-Alpenland Tourismus
Afternoon coffee
Deliano Kaffeerösterei come for the one thing: the house roasted coffee
Hofstatt 2
The Deliano family baked in this room for years, and now they roast in it. Ten years of that, twenty seats, a drum and one roast master watching it. There is a little bike stand outside with tools and a pump, which I mention because by then you will have walked a fair way.
- Mon09:00–17:00
- Tue09:00–17:00
- Wed09:00–17:00
- Thu09:00–17:00
- Fri09:00–17:00
- Sat09:00–17:00
- Sunclosed
The family's bakery and café is two doors along at Hofstatt 13. It opens at 07:00, every day of the year.
Sources: Wasserburger Stimme, Chiemsee-Alpenland Tourismus, Stadt Wasserburg a. Inn
Dinner
Weisses Rössl where locals go
Herrengasse 1
A small room of warm wooden tables on the Herrengasse, cooking German food with a southern accent and no apology for the Bavarian half. Main courses run sixteen to thirty euros, which is what a good small town kitchen ought to cost. Forty seats, four days a week, and the town books them.
- Monclosed
- Tueclosed
- Wed11:30–14:00, 18:00–21:30
- Thu11:30–14:00, 18:00–21:30
- Fri11:30–14:00, 18:00–21:30
- Sat11:30–14:00, 18:00–21:30
- Sunclosed
The house asks you to telephone ahead.
Sources: Falstaff, Schlemmer Atlas (Busche Verlagsgesellschaft), Stadt Wasserburg a. Inn
Checked 2 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Wasserburg am Inn.
Wasserburg is a castle in the water, and the name says exactly that. The castle is first named in 1085. Within the next fifty years the counts moved their seat here from Limburg, onto a tongue of land the Inn wraps around on three sides. The water came first. The name is just bookkeeping.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
On a spoon. The Inn loops almost the whole way round the Old Town, and what is left is a neck of land at the west end with a castle sitting on it. The walls and the rows of houses trace that tongue exactly. Three sides water, one side a gate.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Wasserburg is one of the Inn-Salzach towns that Upper Bavaria laid out to plan in the thirteenth century. They were built as economic and political footholds, and as staging yards for salt and grain behind a wall. The town has a judge of its own by 1323 and its town law by 1334. Of all these river towns, Wasserburg keeps the most complete late Gothic face on a medieval ground plan.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1; www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1085–1247
The counts who moved in here were also the Hallgrafen of Reichenhall, which means salt counts, which means the family that held the saltworks everything on this river was carrying. The line ended with Count Konrad. He had named his cousin the Bavarian duke as his heir, the two of them fell out, and in November 1247 the town went to the duke anyway.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de; www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
- 1247–
From 1247 the dukes of Bavaria hold the town, and they never really hand it back. The salt privileges come from them, and so does the rebuilt wall of 1415. It is still Bavaria today, which after nearly eight hundred years I would call settled.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de; www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2
The emblem
What the shield means.
A rearing lion with a crown. It turns up first on a seal impression from 1292, cut around the middle of that century, and it has barely changed since. The lion is Wittelsbach, taken from the dukes, but Wasserburg wore it alone: no other town in the duchy of Bavaria carried a lion and nothing else at that time. Red and white are the old colours, first painted on a window in the town hall.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The counts who built the castle here were also the Hallgrafen of Reichenhall. Hall means salt. They were, in plain modern German, the salt counts, and they held the saltworks whose goods went down this river.
Look at the town from the south east, across the water, and you are looking at Merian's engraving of 1657. The heritage register says the agreement between the two is still strong. Six centuries of building, and the skyline kept its shape.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
In 1950 the council renamed the Ledererzeile to Ledererstraße. The local history society and the heritage office objected, because an old street name is evidence, and the council took it back at the next meeting. The tanners keep their row.
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Zeile
- A row. Here it is a whole street named for the trade that worked it: Bäckerzeile, Ledererzeile, Salzsenderzeile, Schmidzeile. Four trades, four courses.
- Zipfel
- A pointed end, from the Middle High German zipf. The Weberzipfel was a dead end until 1852, when a new street broke through below the castle. It has a way out now. I liked it better closed.
- Gries
- Sand and gravel, from the Middle High German griez. The Gries is ground the Inn made by putting down what it carried. The town used it as a staging yard and a cattle market. Land the river built, and then people stood on it.
- Durchgang
- A passage cut straight through a block of houses. Allwang, Bauerschweizer, Greinbräu. Short, covered, and there are dots in them.
- Gasse
- The ordinary word for a street here, and there are plenty. Count the names ending in -gasse and you have walked most of the Old Town.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Wasserburg am Inn in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 61streets
- 704dots
- 11.7km of street
- 14.5km on foot
- 4hours 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.