Bremen Night Watchman Walking Tour in German

The Market Square, the Town Hall and the Roland statue

The walk begins on the Market Square, the heart of Bremen for more than six hundred years and one of the finest squares in northern Germany. The Old Town Hall was built between 1405 and 1410 as a Gothic hall and given its ornate Weser Renaissance facade in the early 1600s; together with the Roland statue in front of it, a five-and-a-half-metre stone knight erected in 1404 as the symbol of the city's freedom and market rights, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. Around the square stand the twin-towered St Peter's Cathedral, the gabled guild houses and the Schütting, the old merchants' hall.

Your night watchman explains what each building meant in the Hanseatic city, who was allowed to trade and what happened to those who broke the rules, with the facades lit from below. A Bremen Market Square tour by night shows the square without its daytime crowds, and this first stop takes about 20 minutes.

The Bremen Town Musicians statue, where the tour meets

The meeting point is the bronze statue of the Bremen Town Musicians on the west side of the Old Town Hall: a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster stacked on each other's backs, cast in 1953 and now the most photographed spot in the city. Visitors rub the donkey's front legs for luck, which is why they shine; the watchman has his own version of the tale and of what the four animals have to do with the city's history. You will recognise the guide at once by the costume, the lantern and the halberd.

Since many travellers ask how to get to the Bremen Town Musicians, the answer is a ten-minute walk from the main railway station straight down Sögestraße to the Market Square, or two tram stops to Domsheide. Arrive a few minutes before 20:30 to find the group and take your photo before the walk begins.

Böttcherstraße, the brick lane of the old town

From the Market Square the watchman leads you into Böttcherstraße, a lane just one hundred metres long that was the street of the coopers in the Middle Ages and was rebuilt between 1922 and 1931 by a Bremen coffee merchant as a showcase of brick expressionism. Its red-brick facades, carved reliefs, golden entrance relief and small courtyards make it one of the most unusual streets in Germany, and the House of the Carillon carries a set of porcelain bells that play several times a day, with rotating wooden panels of seafarers and explorers.

At night the lane is lit by lamps set into the brickwork, and the watchman tells how the street was condemned as degenerate in the 1930s and survived. Böttcherstraße at night is quieter than in the day, when it fills with shoppers; allow about 20 minutes here on the walk, and come back by daylight for the museums and craft shops.

The Schnoor, Bremen's oldest quarter

The walk ends in the Schnoor, the oldest surviving quarter of Bremen, a tangle of lanes between the cathedral and the river Weser where fishermen, boatmen and craftsmen lived in tiny houses from the 15th to the 18th century. The name comes from the word for string, because the houses were strung along the lanes like beads, and some passages are barely wide enough for two people. Today the quarter is full of small galleries, cafés, a chocolate maker and craft workshops, but after dark, with the lanterns lit and the shutters closed, it looks much as it did when the night watchman called the hours.

This is where the darkest stories of the tour belong: smugglers, thieves, the plague and the punishments handed out on the square. The Schnoor is worth visiting again by day for its shops; by night it is the most atmospheric fifteen minutes of the walk, and the tour ends here around 22:00.

The night watchman and the old Hanseatic city

Night watchmen were a real institution in Bremen, as in most Hanseatic towns: from the Middle Ages until the 19th century they walked the streets after the gates closed, called out the hours, checked that doors and gates were locked, watched for fires and raised the alarm with their horns. Because they were the only people abroad at night, they knew every secret of the city, and this walk is built on that idea, with stories drawn from the court records and chronicles of Bremen rather than invented legends.

The tour is held in German only and the humour relies on the language, so it suits German speakers best; the route itself is flat, about 1.5 kilometres on cobbles, and there are no entrance tickets, since everything is seen from the street. The walk runs year-round after dark, and in winter the lantern-lit squares are at their most atmospheric.