🇩🇪 Germany · West and the Rhine
Cologne is one of the oldest and most cheerful cities in Germany. Founded by the Romans almost two thousand years ago on the Rhine, today it is an open, tolerant, bustling metropolis, famous above all for three things: its colossal Gothic cathedral — one of the largest in the world — its overflowing carnival and its own beer, Kölsch, served in little 0,2-litre glasses that the waiter keeps replacing. It is a city that takes life with humour and warmth, very unlike the rest of Germany.
Cologne's absolute symbol is the Kölner Dom, the cathedral: twin towers 157 metres high that rise right next to the train station and dominate the whole skyline. Begun in 1248 and only finished in 1880, it holds the shrine of the Three Kings, the very reason for its existence. Around it beats a city of first-rate museums — the Museum Ludwig of modern art, the Roman-Germanic Museum, the Chocolate Museum — twelve Romanesque churches spread around the centre, a lively promenade along the Rhine and dozens of Brauhäuser where you can try Kölsch amid the laughter.
This guide walks through Cologne with a practical, warm eye: how to visit the cathedral and climb its tower, which museums to choose, where and how to drink Kölsch according to its curious rules, when carnival falls and how to get around the city. One important thing to know: Cologne was almost flattened by the bombing of the Second World War, and much of its old town is a careful reconstruction. But that does not take a gram of charm from a city that rose again from its ruins and is today pure life on the banks of the Rhine.
Cologne was born a Roman city. In the year 50 AD, the emperor Claudius raised the settlement on the Rhine to the rank of colonia at the request of his wife Agrippina the Younger, who had been born there, and gave it the name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (hence 'Cologne', and 'Köln' in German). It was the capital of the province of Germania Inferior and a prosperous Roman city, with walls, temples and an aqueduct. In the Middle Ages it became one of the largest and richest cities of the Holy Roman Empire, seat of a powerful archbishopric whose holders were also prince-electors of the Empire. In 1164, Archbishop Rainald of Dassel brought the relics of the Three Kings from Milan, which turned Cologne into one of the great pilgrimage centres of Europe; to house them, construction of the gigantic Gothic cathedral began in 1248, work that was interrupted for centuries and only completed in 1880. A free imperial city from the fifteenth century, Cologne also had its dark episodes, such as the expulsion of its Jewish community in 1424. In the twentieth century, the Second World War hit it full on: Allied bombing — beginning with the first thousand-bomber raid, in May 1942 — destroyed close to 90% of the historic centre. The city was rebuilt after the war and is today a major cultural, economic and festive hub of western Germany. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Rhineland heart of Germany: Cologne, a Roman colony and city of archbishops with its Gothic cathedral; the Rhine valley of castles and legends; Frankfurt, city of imperial coronations and today the financial capital; and the Ruhr basin, the country's industrial forge.
Read the history of West and the Rhine →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Cologne is, first of all, a Roman city, and its very name gives it away. Around 38 BC, the Roman general Agrippa settled an allied Germanic tribe, the Ubii, on the left bank of the Rhine, and they founded a settlement called Oppidum Ubiorum. There, a few decades later, a woman was born who would change the history of the place: Agrippina the Younger, great-granddaughter of the emperor Augustus, sister of Caligula and future wife of the emperor Claudius.
Once she was empress, Agrippina had her home town raised to the rank of Roman colonia. In the year 50 AD, the emperor Claudius granted it that status and gave it a solemn name: Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (the 'colony of Claudius and the altar of the Agrippinenses'). From that Latin name — Colonia — come both the Spanish 'Colonia' and the German 'Köln'. It was one of the few cities in the Empire to bear a woman's name.
Cologne became the capital of the province of Germania Inferior and one of the most important cities in the north of the Empire: it had walls, temples, a forum, a river port, baths and an aqueduct bringing water from the Eifel more than 90 kilometres away. It was also the residence of governors and a key military base facing the Germanic tribes on the far side of the Rhine. From that Roman splendour there remain stretches of wall, the Roman Tower (Römerturm), fragments of the aqueduct and the magnificent Dionysus mosaic, now in the Roman-Germanic Museum. Almost two thousand years later, Cologne is still, in its foundations, a Roman city.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Cologne passed to the Franks and, in time, became one of the great cities of the medieval world. The key to its power was the Church: Cologne was the seat of an archbishopric going back to Roman times, and its archbishops piled up immense power. They not only directed the religious life of a vast region: they were also territorial princes and, from the late Middle Ages, they were among the seven prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the men who chose the emperor. The archbishop of Cologne was thus one of the most powerful men in Europe.
The city grew until, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was the largest in Germany and one of the largest on the continent, with tens of thousands of inhabitants, a flourishing port on the Rhine and a wealth expressed in an unmatched religious display: the twelve great Romanesque churches that still dot the centre today. Cologne was a centre of trade, pilgrimage and learning, with a university founded in 1388, one of the oldest in central Europe.
But Cologne's citizens and merchants clashed more and more with the power of their archbishops. In 1288, after the battle of Worringen, the city effectively freed itself from the archbishop's rule, and he had to move his residence to Bonn. In 1475 that status was formalised: Cologne was recognised as a free imperial city (Freie Reichsstadt), governed by its own citizens and answerable only to the emperor. It was the start of centuries of proud self-government.
The event that shaped Cologne's destiny forever happened in 1164. That year, Archbishop Rainald of Dassel, chancellor to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, brought an extraordinary treasure to the city: the relics believed to be those of the three Magi, taken as spoils in the conquest of Milan. The arrival of the Magi's remains made Cologne one of the greatest pilgrimage centres of medieval Christendom, on a par with Rome or Santiago de Compostela. Crowds came to venerate them, and to hold them a lavish shrine of gold, silver and precious stones was commissioned — the Dreikönigenschrein — a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing still kept behind the cathedral's high altar today.
Relics like those deserved a temple to match. In 1248 the foundation stone was laid for a colossal Gothic cathedral, meant to be one of the largest in Christendom. Work went on for centuries, but around 1560 it stopped for lack of funds and because times had changed, leaving the cathedral half-built: the choir finished, one tower cut off halfway up with a huge wooden crane fixed at the top, which for almost three hundred years was part of Cologne's skyline.
The final push came in the nineteenth century. At the height of Romanticism and rising German nationalism, completing Cologne Cathedral became a national cause. With the backing of the king of Prussia and using the original medieval Gothic plans, which had survived, work resumed in 1842 and was completed in 1880, more than six hundred years after it had begun. Emperor William I presided over the ceremony. For four years, with its 157-metre towers, it was the tallest building in the world.
Cologne's history also has dark chapters that the city today faces honestly. Cologne was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities north of the Alps, documented as early as the year 321 AD in a decree of the emperor Constantine, which makes it the oldest Jewish community in Germany for which written evidence survives. Through the Middle Ages, Cologne's Jews lived in their own quarter around what is now the town hall square (Rathausplatz), with their synagogue, their school, their hospital and an underground ritual bath (mikveh).
That coexistence was marked by discrimination and violence. As in so many European cities, Cologne's Jews suffered persecution, above all during the Crusades and in the time of the Black Death of 1349, when they were falsely accused of spreading the disease and many were murdered. Finally, in 1424, the city council decided to expel the Jewish community from Cologne for good, and it could not legally settle there again for almost four centuries.
What is remarkable is that the quarter did not vanish entirely: it was buried. Under the town hall square, archaeological excavations brought to light the remains of the medieval synagogue and, above all, the impressive twelfth-century mikveh, a stone ritual well that descends several metres to the level of the Rhine's groundwater. Over that Jewish quarter and over the remains of the Roman praetorium the MiQua museum has been built, an archaeological site preserving two thousand years of Cologne's history underground. The city remembers that past without hiding it.
After centuries as a free city, Cologne lost its independence under Napoleonic occupation (1794-1814) and then became part of the kingdom of Prussia. In the nineteenth century it industrialised and grew strongly, recovered its university and, in 1880, finally celebrated the completion of its cathedral. Into the twentieth century, under mayor Konrad Adenauer — future first chancellor of West Germany — the city modernised with parks, avenues and trade fairs. But catastrophe was approaching.
Under Nazism, from 1933, Cologne suffered the persecution of opponents and, above all, of its Jewish community, which had flourished again in the nineteenth century. Cologne's Jews were stripped of their rights, their businesses looted, their synagogue burned in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and finally they were deported and murdered in the Holocaust. It was the extermination of a community with almost two thousand years of history in the city.
During the Second World War, Cologne, a major industrial centre and rail hub on the Rhine, became one of the main targets of Allied bombing. On the night of 30-31 May 1942, the British RAF launched 'Operation Millennium' over the city, the first air raid in history with more than a thousand bombers: around 1.000 aircraft dropped their loads in barely an hour and a half. That was only the beginning. Over the course of the war, successive raids destroyed close to 90% of Cologne's historic centre. The population, which was around 770.000 before the war, had fallen to a few tens of thousands by the time American troops took the city in March 1945. The cathedral, miraculously, was still standing amid a sea of rubble, badly damaged but recognisable, and it became a symbol of the city's survival.
Postwar Cologne had to be reborn almost from scratch. With 90% of its centre destroyed, the city faced a monumental reconstruction that went on for decades. The choice was a mix of restoration and modernity: some gems were faithfully rebuilt — the Romanesque churches, the town hall, part of the old town beside the Rhine — while other districts went up in the functional architecture of the fifties and sixties. That is why anyone walking through Cologne's Altstadt today is largely walking through a careful recreation of the historic city, not through original medieval buildings. That honesty is part of the city's character.
The cathedral was repaired and, once the emergency works were done, it dominated the skyline again. In 1996, the Kölner Dom was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. The twelve Romanesque churches were restored one by one through the second half of the twentieth century, an enormous heritage recovery effort.
Today Cologne is Germany's fourth city and a major cultural, media and economic hub of the west of the country: home to important international trade fairs, to media companies, to a vibrant art scene and to a large university. But if anything defines it, it is its character: cheerful, tolerant, open and quick to joke, very different from the rest of Germany. Its carnival — the 'fifth season' — is one of the biggest in Europe; its Kölsch beer, served in 0,2-litre glasses, is an institution; and its people are famous for their hospitality and their local pride. Cologne is a city that was flattened and rose again, and that celebrates life on the banks of the Rhine like few others in the world.