About Nuremberg Guide
Nuremberg Guide is an independent guide to Nuremberg, written by a licensed city guide who works here. It covers the practical parts: what things cost, when they are shut, what you can walk to for nothing, and the short list of things that are genuinely better with somebody explaining them.
Who I am
I am Katrin Ostermeier. I am a staatlich geprüfte Gästeführerin — a state-certified guide — and I have been licensed in Nuremberg for eleven years. I live in Gostenhof, one tram stop west of the old town. My working year has a strange shape: the rally grounds and the Palace of Justice through the cold months, when the ground out at the Dutzendteich is frozen and half my group has come because of a film, and then the Christkindlesmarkt through December, when the same square I cross every morning holds two hundred stalls and a great many people who did not expect it to be that full.
Being local is not by itself a qualification, so here is what it actually buys you. I know which of the questions visitors ask have clean answers and which do not. Whether the castle needs booking. Whether there is anything to see at the rally grounds. Whether Courtroom 600 will be open on the Tuesday you are here. Those are the questions I answer standing in the street several times a week, and the answers on this site are the answers I give in person — including the ones that talk somebody out of buying something.
Why this site keeps telling you things are free
Because they are, and you would find out anyway. Nuremberg is unusual among German cities in how much of its most important ground costs nothing to stand on. The rally grounds are open land with no gate and no ticket. The Christkindlesmarkt has no admission, despite a thousand people a month searching for tickets to it. The castle is a state museum you buy at the door, not a timed-entry attraction you queue online for months ahead.
A guide that hid all that to sell you a tour would be a bad guide and, more to the point, an obvious one. So every page here starts with the free route, in full, with the door price and the walking directions — and then, separately and honestly, makes the case for the guided version where there is a real case to make. Those are two different products, not two prices for the same one. The empty field at the Zeppelinfeld is free; someone standing on it telling you what happened there and why half of it is fenced off is not, and for most visitors it is worth paying for. I say which is which on every page, and I try never to blur the two.
What I do here
I write the guides, I check the numbers, and I read the tours before I list them. Every figure was verified against a named source rather than copied from another guide, and where two sources disagree I write the softer of the two and say so — there is a rail closure notice on the Munich route page where the published end date differs by a day between sources, and it says exactly that rather than picking one. I am not a tour operator and I do not sell tickets. When you are ready to book, I send you to GetYourGuide; where a place sells better at its own door, I send you to the door.
How this site is funded
I earn a small affiliate commission when you book a tour through a link here, at no extra cost to you. That is what keeps the site free and keeps it updated. It does not change what I recommend, and on several pages it costs me money to say the true thing — the affiliate disclosure lists those pages by name.
Corrections are welcome and I act on them. Prices move, the museums rearrange their winter hours, and the Memorium adds event closures to its calendar through the year. If something here is out of date, tell me and I will fix it.