Frankfurt, the city everyone changes trains in

Frankfurt turns up in a lot of rail itineraries by accident. The Hauptbahnhof is Germany's second busiest station, moving around 493,000 people a day across twenty-four platforms, and it is a terminus, so long-distance trains reverse back out the way they came. Cross Germany by train and there is a good chance you stand here whether or not you meant to.

The reputation — banking, glass, skip it — is not a lie exactly. Forty-three buildings here pass a hundred metres, more than the rest of Germany managed between them, and they were built for the people who work in them rather than for anyone to look at. But Frankfurt is also small: 778,000 people, and almost everything below is within twenty minutes of the station on foot. Big-city money, small-city distances. Give it a day — usually one, not two, but a good one.

The old town is eight years old

Walk east from the Römerberg towards the cathedral and you are in a district that did not exist when most people reading this started secondary school. Frankfurt's medieval centre — roughly 1,250 timber-framed houses — burned in the bombing raids of March 1944. A concrete slab called the Technisches Rathaus went up on part of the site in the 1970s and came down again in 2010. In its place the city built 35 houses — 15 reconstructions of buildings that had stood there, 20 new ones — and opened the quarter in May 2018, at a cost near 200 million euros.

Knowing that is what makes it worth standing in. Once you can see the seams — sandstone that has not weathered, double glazing behind the leaded lights — it gets more interesting than an unbombed old town would be, and German architecture magazines are still arguing about whether a city should do this at all.

The building at the end of the street is called a cathedral and never has been one; Frankfurt has no bishop. From 1356 the Holy Roman Emperors were elected in a chapel off its right aisle, and from 1562 crowned in the church too, then walked to the Römer down the street you have just come along. Three euros and 328 steps take you up the tower.

Two museums, chosen so you don't attempt fifteen

More than a dozen museums stand in a line along Schaumainkai. Do not try to do the row.

Give the morning to the Städel. It exists because a Frankfurt banker, Johann Friedrich Städel, died in 1816 and left his house, his pictures and his money to the city's citizens rather than to a prince — a very Frankfurt origin story for an art collection. The part to walk on is the garden: in 2012 the museum buried a 3,000-square-metre hall under the lawn for its contemporary work and lit it with 195 round skylights that swell up through the grass. Nineteen euros, ten on Tuesdays after 3pm, closed Mondays.

The Senckenberg, across the river by the university, is where to go if you would rather have bones. Its best material came out of the ground 35 kilometres away, at the Messel Pit — an oil-shale quarry lined up to become a rubbish tip until local resistance stopped it, and Germany's first natural World Heritage site from December 1995. The shale held 48-million-year-old animals so completely that the exhibits show the outline of fur and the contents of a stomach. Twelve euros, six on Wednesday evenings.

Lunch, standing up

The Kleinmarkthalle on Hasengasse is a clinker-brick box from 1954, put up to replace a hall bombed in 1944, and it holds more than sixty traders across 1,500 square metres. It is a working market, not a food court — closed all day Sunday, packed up by four on Saturday — and the way to use it is to buy downstairs and carry it up. On the gallery a Rhine winery, Rollanderhof, runs a counter and an open terrace facing Liebfrauenplatz, pouring its own wine by the glass until eight on weekdays: two hours after the stalls below have shut. Eat downstairs, drink upstairs, watch the hall empty underneath you.

Green, and a hill

The Palmengarten is the other thing money bought. Prussia annexed the Duchy of Nassau in 1866 and the deposed Duke Adolph needed cash; what he had was 200 exotic plants in his winter garden at Biebrich. Frankfurt citizens formed a committee, issued shares, bought the collection for 60,000 gulden and opened a garden around it in March 1871. The Palm House they built to hold it still stands, 52 metres of glass without a single interior pillar. Nine euros, five after half six on a summer weekday.

For something free with a walk in it, go out to the Lohrberg in Seckbach. It is 185 metres high, which counts as a mountain here, and its south slope holds the only vineyard left inside the city: 1.3 hectares, taken off the Carmelites in 1803 and city-owned ever since, still the easternmost patch of the Rheingau. About 10,000 bottles of Riesling a year come off it, and the skyline lines up across the orchards from the top.

The building nobody puts on a postcard

Northwest of the centre, the university's Westend campus is one enormous curved building finished in 1930 by Hans Poelzig for IG Farben — then the largest chemical company in the world, and the company that built a synthetic-rubber plant at Auschwitz and worked prisoners from the Buna/Monowitz camp in it. The Americans took the building in March 1945 and Eisenhower ran his headquarters from it; the humanities faculties moved in in 2001.

You can walk in. The paternosters still run — doorless cabins on a slow continuous loop that you step into while they are moving — and unrestricted public use was restored in 2019 after years of needing a university pass. Outside, on Norbert-Wollheim-Platz, a pavilion carries the number 107984 above the door: the Auschwitz number of the man who brought the first compensation case against IG Farben, in 1951. Thirteen photographic panels of Buna/Monowitz prisoners stand in the grass around it. Both are free.

After dark

The Main Tower is the only one of the towers with a public roof. Nine euros buys a lift to the 54th floor and an open terrace at 200 metres — the height at which the skyline stops being a photograph and turns back into a small city with a river through it. Until 11pm on summer Fridays and Saturdays, last lift 45 minutes before.

Putting it together

The new old town and the cathedral steps before lunch, the Kleinmarkthalle for it, the Städel or the Senckenberg through the afternoon, Main Tower once dark. A second day takes the Poelzig building and then the Lohrberg, which wants dry ground and daylight. One thing to know: the Museumsuferfest takes both riverbanks on the last weekend of August — 28 to 30 August in 2026 — and every bed in the city with it.