Cities of Germany

Germany's urban population is unusually evenly spread. Unlike France or the United Kingdom, Germany has no single dominant capital that outweighs every other city — a consequence of the country only unifying in 1871, by which point Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt had each spent centuries as independent commercial or royal centres.

Four German cities pass one million residents: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne. Below them sit roughly 76 further Großstädte, the official German classification for a city of more than 100,000 people. The table below ranks the cities covered by Everything About Germany, largest first.

There is no single best city in Germany, because the country's cities specialise. Choosing well is mostly a question of matching a city to what you actually want from the trip:

• First-time visitors — Munich. Munich delivers the Germany most travellers picture (beer halls, Bavarian architecture, the Alps an hour away) while being compact, safe and easy to cross by U-Bahn.
• Modern history and nightlife — Berlin. Berlin is where the twentieth century is most legible on the street, from the Wall memorial at Bernauer Straße to the Reichstag dome, and its club culture has no European equal.
• Architecture and old towns — Dresden, Bamberg and Regensburg. Dresden's Baroque core was rebuilt after 1945; Bamberg and Regensburg were never bombed, so their medieval street plans survive intact as UNESCO World Heritage sites.
• Maritime Germany — Hamburg. Hamburg has more bridges than Venice and Amsterdam combined, and the Speicherstadt warehouse district is the largest of its kind anywhere.
• Christmas markets — Nuremberg and Dresden. The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt and Dresden's Striezelmarkt are the two oldest and most heavily attended in the country.
• Wine and river scenery — Trier, Würzburg and Freiburg, each sitting inside a working wine region rather than beside one.

Trier is the oldest city in Germany, founded by the Romans in 16 BC as Augusta Treverorum. Trier still holds the largest concentration of Roman monuments north of the Alps, including the Porta Nigra city gate, the imperial baths and the basilica of Constantine.

Cologne, Mainz, Augsburg, Worms and Speyer are the other cities with continuous Roman foundations, all established along the Rhine and Danube frontiers between roughly 38 BC and 15 BC. Their age is legible in the street layout: a Roman grid at the centre, a medieval ring around it, and nineteenth-century boulevards beyond that.

Germany's smaller cities are frequently better preserved than its large ones, because Allied bombing concentrated on industrial and port centres. Towns such as Bamberg, Quedlinburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Görlitz, Wismar and Lüneburg came through the Second World War with their historic cores largely intact, and several now hold UNESCO World Heritage status on that basis.

Most sit within ninety minutes of a major hub by regional train, which makes them practical day trips rather than separate stays: Bamberg from Nuremberg, Quedlinburg from Leipzig, Lüneburg from Hamburg, Görlitz from Dresden.

Germany's rail network is the practical default for city-to-city travel. Deutsche Bahn's Intercity-Express (ICE) services run at up to 300 km/h and connect every major hub, putting Berlin to Munich at roughly four hours and Cologne to Frankfurt at about one.

Two things decide what a German train journey costs. Booking early converts a walk-up Flexpreis fare into a Sparpreis one, often at a third of the price. And for regional travel, the Deutschlandticket — a monthly subscription covering every local and regional service nationwide — is usually cheaper than three or four separate regional tickets, though it is not valid on ICE, IC or EC trains.

Long-distance coaches remain a genuine alternative on some corridors, and domestic flights rarely make sense inside Germany once airport transfers are counted.